Tegel airport area
No injuries in fire in Berlin refugee accommodation
Firefighters extinguish the last fires in the refugee accommodation at the former Tegel Airport. photo
© Sebastian Gollnow/dpa
The refugee accommodation on the site of the former Tegel Airport is probably one of the largest in Germany. Thousands of people live there. Now it burned.
The fire in a refugee accommodation on the site of the former airport A tent hall in Tegel burned down. Several hundred people were able to be brought to safety in time. Nobody got hurt. According to the operator, all residents, including children, were able to leave the burning hall in time. There were also animals in the hall.
At the beginning of the operation, the Berlin fire brigade had expected many injuries. Thousands of people live in the camp in dozens of lightweight halls, and a thick cloud of smoke over the site in the northwest of the capital could be seen for kilometers.
According to reports, the tent with an area of 1000 square meters burned down completely. A spokesman said the fire department could rule out the possibility of the fire spreading to other tents. He spoke of a “clear situation”. There was still some follow-up work to extinguish the fire later in the afternoon. The cause of the fire was initially unclear.
Halls evacuated in good time
According to their own information, the fire department was alerted at 1:47 p.m. and deployed with around 100 emergency services. The fire department initially reported that there were fires in three tents. “We expect several people to be injured,” said the spokesman. However, according to the Berlin State Office for Refugee Affairs (LAF), all residents were able to leave the accommodation in time. Personal belongings had to be left behind.
There is still a fire station on the former airport site. That’s why emergency services were on site very quickly and were able to prevent the fire from spreading to a neighboring hall, said Per Kleist, general operations manager for the fire department.
According to an authority spokeswoman, 301 people from Ukraine lived in the residential tent that burned down. Some people had medical examinations as a precaution. Another four halls in the area around the scene of the fire were evacuated in good time.
Accommodation for the affected refugees secured
According to the LAF spokeswoman, alternative accommodation for the affected people has been ensured. The accommodation, designed for up to 7,000 people, is currently occupied by around 4,500 people, she said. There is therefore enough space in other halls on site for the 301 refugees who were brought to safety from the tent in question. According to the information, there are a total of 40 lightweight halls on the site. When Berlin-Brandenburg Airport (BER) went into operation in October 2020, Tegel Airport was closed.
The cause of the fire is still unclear
Many residents who were not there at the time of the fire gathered in front of the site – and later waited in front of the gates to be admitted. There were traffic jams in the area and bus traffic was also affected. Dozens of fire engines were parked on the airport grounds and thick fire hoses lay on the ground.
The cause of fire was unclear for the moment. In the afternoon, Berlin’s Social Senator Cansel Kiziltepe (SPD) got an impression of the situation on site. “The security acted quickly and prudently, brought everyone to safety and thus saved lives. The emergency services were quickly on site and extinguished the fire,” said the senator and thanked them. Kiziltepe had recently pointed out several times that such large accommodations should be viewed critically. At the end of last year there were violent clashes in the accommodation.
The arrival center for migrants is probably one of the largest in the country. Those seeking protection are only supposed to stay in the mass accommodation temporarily, but some of them are stuck there for months. The facility was originally intended exclusively as an arrival center for war refugees from Ukraine.
The Pro Asyl organization and the Berlin Refugee Council called for the mass accommodation in Berlin-Tegel to be closed. “We have warned again and again in the past that cramming so many people into precarious accommodation is extremely dangerous,” Tareq Alaows of Pro Asyl said in a statement.