House after fire in rubble and ash: "We just made sure that we got out of there"
Created: 01/19/2022, 06:00
By: Barbara Schlotterer-Fuchs
A picture of the destruction at the "Gäßele" in Ober-Apfeldorf: the former farmhouse and barn lies in rubble and ash after the extinguishing work.
© Hans-Helmut Herold
A fire destroyed a house in Ober-Apfeldorf.
The family is left with nothing.
But the residents were able to save the most important thing: their lives.
Apfeldorf
- A skeleton, the facade charred: That's how they stand there, the remains of the house in Ober-Apfeldorf the morning after the fire disaster. The extinguishing water, which had to be sprayed into the burning building by hectoliters by 8 p.m. on Monday evening, runs down the remains of the facade. Charred wooden beams, crumbling roof tiles, a charred bill, between the heaps of personal documents in broken folders: the mood is gloomy in the morning after a long, cold night watch that has left the firefighters in the limbs.
24 hours after the fire broke out, Roland Bayer is standing in front of the ruins of his existence.
He lived here for many happy years.
Today, as if in shock, he looks at what is left for him and his children.
"My wife, my son and I sat in the living room and had breakfast," he says of the morning that was to change his life and that of his family from the ground up.
The doorbell rings.
An acquaintance is there.
"He said: You're on fire!"
Neighbor saves the residents of the burning house
Roland Bayer grabs a fire extinguisher and runs to the barn.
"It was already ablaze there." Where all the machines for cutting wood can only be seen in outline, the new Bulldog lies in rubble and ashes, there is nothing left to save, the family man quickly realises.
He knows: Now it has to be fast.
"We just made sure that we could get out." After all, he lives in the part of the building that adjoins the barn.
The Bayers have taken nothing.
What Roland Bayer is wearing that day he got from a friend to wear, he says.
However, he, his wife and son saved one thing: their lives.
"Thank God.
If that had happened at night, we wouldn't have had a chance.
Smoke inhalation, then you're gone and burned.” A bitter consolation.
Hardly recognizable: Not much is left of the tractor used for felling wood.
© Hans-Helmut Herold
The family stayed in a holiday apartment in Apfeldorf.
The home on the "Gäßele" will probably never be habitable in this form again.
That much is certain.
Roland Bayer stands there and waits.
To the fire investigators.
He's not even allowed to go into the remains of the house to see what might still be left of the old life - the fire site has been generously cordoned off with warning tape.
The fact that he has not heard from the fire investigators of the CID is probably also due to the fact that there were at least seven fires in the Landsberg district alone in the period from Monday to Tuesday.
Also in Kinsau, where in the night when the Apfeldorf fire watch was on duty, the comrades from neighboring Kinsau had to move out at 3 a.m. to a garage fire.
Neighbor discovers a column of smoke over the threshing floor
The sirens also woke neighbor Anton Erhard from his sleep. He looks at what is left of the Bayer house in disbelief. "We were so scared that the fire would spread to our side because of the wind." He, too, was having breakfast when he looked out from the patio - and was taken aback by a column of smoke hanging over the sky. "I saw that there was fire on the threshing floor." He no longer dared to go there. "Everything was full of smoke," he recalls. "It was an inferno."
A resident of Apfeldorf who wants to help feels just how dangerous the smoke is.
When he wants to get a compressor, he has to pass the burning barn.
"The whole skin has detached from his cheek," explains one of the many people who looked stunned at the scene of the fire yesterday, Tuesday.
And a stroke of fate for the neighbors.
"It's something when you lose your homeland," he says sadly.
Like other people from Apfeldorf, Erhard is already thinking about how he can help the family.
"In our village, something like that still works."
West wind made extinguishing work difficult
The huge operation with 150 helpers worked well on Monday, sums up the Apfeldorf fire brigade commander.
Thanks to the Birkländer fire-fighting water barrel, a line that was laid to the Ritzinger Weiher and the village's own fire-fighting water reserves in an old oel pit, the flames could be fought from all sides.
Not an easy task for the firefighters: the westerly wind in particular was a challenge.
"The neighboring development was in danger."
In addition, the wind had repeatedly ignited the fire under the roof - most recently at 2 a.m.
After a labour-intensive fire station, the fire brigade in Apfeldorf continued on Tuesday.
The clean-up work on site dragged on until the evening.