storm
No more search for firefighter missing in floods
The strong current caused the rescue boat to capsize. Photo
© Karl-Josef Hildenbrand/dpa
Five emergency services are travelling on a boat through the Bavarian town of Offingen at night. The boat capsizes and a 22-year-old firefighter is missing. The police have now stopped the active search for him.
The search for a firefighter who went missing in the floods in Swabia is no longer being carried out. The 22-year-old probably drowned, a police spokesman said this morning. He will probably be found when the water has receded. The young man was in Offingen near the border with Baden-Württemberg in a DLRG water rescue boat. The boat, which was manned by five rescue workers, capsized in a strong current. Four rescue workers aged between 24 and 70 were able to save themselves on land and were uninjured.
Shortly afterwards, volunteers from the volunteer fire brigade, the DLRG water rescue service, the water rescue service, the German armed forces and the police began searching for the 22-year-old. If the 22-year-old did indeed die, he would be the fifth known fatality from the floods in Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg.
Emergency services in Baden-Württemberg found two dead bodies in a drained cellar in Schorndorf, east of Stuttgart. The police said they were a 58-year-old resident and his 84-year-old mother. According to witnesses, both were busy pumping out water that had entered the house in the cellar.
In Schrobenhausen in Upper Bavaria, a 43-year-old woman died in the basement of a flooded house over the weekend. In Pfaffenhofen an der Ilm, a firefighter who died during a rescue operation was recovered dead.