Wolfgang Schäuble has been with the Munich professional fire brigade for almost 30 years, for 18 years as its chief, but he has never experienced a day like August 20, 2022: It started with a fire in the sauna area of the fire brigade in the morning Prinzregentenbades erupted, which was difficult to extinguish. It continued with support services at the various sporting events of the European Championships, which also took place at various locations in the city area. And it ended with Helene Fischer’s big concert in front of 130,000 spectators at the exhibition center in Riem, where the sum of minor injuries and circulatory collapse led to a peak load on the rescue service. Before the concert could take place, the first 30,000 visitors had to be brought to safety from an approaching thunderstorm with heavy rain. “It was a demanding day – from 6 a.m. to midnight,” said Schäuble, summing up the Munich professional fire brigade’s annual report on Wednesday.
The chief fire director and his people were not bored on the other 364 days of 2022 either. On average, they were alerted more than 270 times a day, which added up to almost 100,000 calls – 99,492 to be exact. That is almost eleven percent more than the year before (89,815) and almost 25 percent more than in the Corona year 2020 (80,678), when people were at home a lot. The increase is mainly due to the fact that the rescue service was increasingly requested. No vehicle from the fire brigade was deployed more frequently in 2022 than the ambulance stationed in Thalkirchen – 4737 times, the equivalent of every two hours. He was practically in constant use.
Because of their original task of fighting fires, the firefighters were still alerted 7,748 times, and in 1,475 cases they actually had to put out a fire, most of which were small or medium-sized. However, the professional fire brigade also rushed to eleven major fires like the one in the Prinzregentenbad last year.
The tasks of the fire brigade have changed further in the past year, as the new district administration officer Hanna Sammüller-Gradl has already noticed. Because of the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine and the resulting energy crisis, civil protection, which had been pushed into the background after the end of the Cold War, has returned to consciousness, she said. The city has installed a total of three staffs for extraordinary events (SAE), all of which are headed by the fire department, namely by Wolfgang Schäuble. The 60-year-old is not only Munich’s first firefighter, but also the top civil protection officer.
The fire brigade is replacing six of its small alarm vehicles with newer models
Sammüller-Gradl praised the fact that the Munich fire brigade is at the forefront when it comes to digitization and even received an award for a geodata information system as Schäuble’s merit. She explained that the geodata could be used, for example, to monitor the movement of refugees in Eastern Europe during the Ukraine war and to prepare appropriate measures in Munich. As far as the Ukraine aid is concerned, Schäuble thanked the volunteer fire brigades: “Especially for large-scale events, we are very dependent on them.”
The new small alarm vehicles have more tools on board, including for rescuing and capturing animals.
(Photo: Lorenz Mehrlich)
Of course, Schäuble doesn’t know what challenges the year 2023 will bring: “More banal things, I hope.” The fire brigade has already prepared itself for them. On Wednesday, Schäuble presented eight new small alarm vehicles at fire station 9 in Neuperlach, in short: “Klaf” – “the secret stars among the fire engines”, as he thinks. The “mobile toolboxes”, as David Kress, who is responsible for procuring resources, calls them, are used to carry out tasks that are neither personnel-intensive nor particularly urgent: rescuing animals (1524 last year), pumping out water damage (442 operations ), cleaning up roads after traffic accidents (432).
Since 2006, the fire brigade has had six such Klaf, which are now being replaced. In view of the latest figures, the concept and equipment have been revised, explained Kreß. In addition to sewage pumps, binders and boards, there will be more tools for rescuing and catching animals on board in future: catch baskets, throw nets, snake hooks, transport baskets in various sizes. The tasks of the fire brigade are so varied: In 2022, they not only extinguished the fire in the Prinzregentenbad, but also freed a little hedgehog whose leg got caught in a manhole cover.