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Emergency services and evacuated residents in front of the house in Berlin-Mitte
Photo:
Annette Riedl / dpa
The good news first: According to the fire department, no one was injured in the incident.
100 emergency services were deployed in the Mitte district of Berlin on Wednesday evening after the entire roof of an eight-storey house caught fire.
A fire brigade spokesman said that a compressed gas tank on the house exploded during the firefighting operation.
There was a fireball.
The fire on and in the scaffolded building near Chausseestraße was extinguished in the evening.
It is the job of the police to determine the cause of the fire.
At the house not far from the Dorotheenstadt cemetery there is reconstruction work, said the spokesman for the fire brigade.
However, it is still inhabited.
A resident told the dpa news agency that there had been roof work on the building.
“Otherwise there would certainly have been injuries”
According to the spokesman, there was a fire both on the 300 square meter flat roof and on the eighth floor below.
The tenants on this floor had to leave their apartments.
In the explosion, flying debris would have spread to the neighboring roofs.
"We've checked them now," said the fire department spokesman.
But above all, the emergency services on the ground were at risk.
The police "cleared the sidewalks and streets of passers-by in an exemplary manner," he explained.
"Otherwise there would certainly have been injuries."
The explosion could also be heard several kilometers away from the fire in Berlin-Mitte - for example at Plötzensee.
Shortly after the fire broke out, the fire brigade announced on Twitter: "We're getting a lot of calls." A little later, the Twitter account said that four people had been taken to safety and cared for by the Red Cross.
The fire brigade also published a photo of the burning roof on Thursday night.
aar/dpa