First the storm night, then another eight hours of fire: around 80 firefighters were on Friday in a fire in the wood-fired CHP plant in the municipality of Warngau. The stored fuel had caught fire.
Warngau - It was a stormy night for the fire fighters in the Nordland district. And for some, a very short one without use: At 6.40 a.m., the snow plow driver rang the commandant Johann Eder from Warngau, who lives in the vicinity of the thermal power station and the fire station because he noticed heavy smoke, Eder says. The commander immediately raised the alarm.
According to the police, according to initial findings, a technical defect in the screw conveyor ensured that the wood chips did what they were supposed to do, but where they were not supposed to: They ignited in the storage area. A dangerous situation with tons of fired goods.
First of all, the fire fighters had to find the source of the fire under respiratory protection in the completely smoky thermal power station, explains Eder. "We gradually worked our way forward because everything was under smoke." Then it really started with the sweaty work. In order to be able to find all of the embers nests safely, to extinguish them and to prevent them from flaring up again, the roughly 30 cubic meters of wood chips in the half-filled one had to be removed from the warehouse, explains Eder.
Exhausting effort: 30 cubic meters of smoky wood chips have to be removed
The heating plant in Warngau was completely used up.
© Thomas Plettenberg
A Miesbacher company was called in to pump out the wood chips. To make this possible, the firefighters had to loosen and extinguish the smoldering woodchip heap in small groups of two to three respiratory protection wearers with shovels piece by piece. In the meantime, it had become a bit dangerous when the smoldering fire flared up. A total of 13 vehicles with around 80 volunteers were involved in the complex procedure, which was only completed at 2:30 p.m., according to Eder. "It was very tedious." Nobody was hurt; the facility is largely automated and the emergency services also remained intact.
Since the end of 2015, the municipality has been supplying heat to several municipal and private buildings in Oberwarngau and feeding electricity into the grid. According to Eder, the emergency heating was put into operation late on Friday afternoon in order to supply customers to the local heating network. The screw conveyor must be replaced.
Katrin Hager