In the underground car park of the Starnberg District Office, fire raged in three places on Wednesday evening, thick smoke billowed from the stairwells, smoke detectors sounded the alarm with the volume of a jackhammer - the situation was frightening for observers, but it was not real. The Starnberg fire brigade and those from Unterbrunn as well as the BRK readiness groups in Starnberg, Gauting and Gilching practiced the procedure in the event of an underground garage fire.
Starnberg
- Kreisbrandmeister Max Wastian had designed the exercise, which was about the so-called raid tactics: five fire fighters with breathing apparatus are then deployed, not two as with normal fires. Objective: Fight fire to save people. In the scenario there were injured - Anita Hanseder, Matthias Glasow and Clarissa Stegmüller from Breitschaft Gilching, who had made up seriously injured in a few minutes and were hiding in the underground car park. Wastian had filled it so realistically with fog machines that you really couldn't see anything; the sources of the fire were orange lamps.
The alarm for the Starnberg Wehr was on fire alarms, and half of them moved out first. When it became clear that it was really “on fire”, other units were alerted, as was the BRK. The three raiders went down the stairwells into the underground car park, were able to briefly prepare in front of smoke protection doors and then go into the smoke. This process is the same as that later in the B 2 tunnel, in the event of a fire there - access via emergency exits and tunnels to the side of the tunnel. Numerous Starnberg activists had learned it in spring during a special training course at the IFA in Switzerland and were now teaching it to other comrades. Trying out what had been learned in a large-scale exercise was also a goal, as Wastian says. And: the fire fighting teams once got to know the underground car park,which in a real emergency there shortens the chaos phase until one has orientated oneself once. Why not go through the entrance to the underground car park? When there's a fire, that's where the greatest heat and smoke comes out - that hinders the rescuers. That's why the tactic is to blow the smoke out there.
Everything worked out, the goal of the exercise was achieved.
"But we have also recognized points where we can still improve," sums up the district fire chief.
The chief of operations was Starnberg's commander Markus Grasl, who prepared the emergency services for the tunnel through such exercises.
The Unterbrunners were there because they will be needed later in a tunnel operation.
A total of around 40 firefighters and 20 helpers from the BRK were on duty, after two and a half hours everything was done.