Before the demolition is due, the old middle school in Holzkirchen had a dramatic appearance: During a large-scale exercise on Friday evening, more than 200 emergency services from the fire brigade and BRK arrived there.
Holzkirchen
– At 6.43 p.m. the siren sounds through Holzkirchen, six minutes later the first vehicle reaches the middle school on Baumgartenstrasse.
Head of operations Sebastian Dirigo from the Holzkirchner fire brigade rushes to the entrance to the auditorium.
At this point he only knows: The integrated control center (ILS) in Rosenheim has called the Holzkirchner fire brigade to a category "B5 school" operation, to an extensive building fire in a school.
On site he receives new messages, they are not good: "My students are in the building, but I don't know exactly where," says a teacher who meets Dirigo in front of the door.
Lives are in danger, Dirigo must now decide how to proceed.
The teacher has burns on her head and a colleague has injuries on her arm.
Both seem hectic, thick smoke is coming out of the building.
Luckily, this didn't come from a real fire, but from a smoke machine.
The injuries aren't real either.
It is a large-scale exercise.
A good 150 emergency services from fire brigades and BRK were announced, but more than 200 are actually deployed.
Commander Ludwig Würmseer explains: "Every position in the fire brigade has something to do in such an operation.
We managed to practice that today.” Since the school building is about to be demolished, the opportunity to carry out such an exercise was seized.
The missing students are played by the fire brigade youth, the teachers by Sabine and Patrizia Schmid, wife and daughter of Holzkirchen's mayor Christoph Schmid.
He watches the exercise himself as a spectator and sees how more and more Florian's disciples are arriving.
They act calmly and with concentration and begin to roll out hoses.
Beeping life insurance for SCBA wearers
In the meantime, a briefing has revealed that the interior attack is being launched.
The breathing apparatus wearers with their masks on their faces look almost uncanny.
The colleague's oxygen bottle is quickly tested, then the men disappear in the dark.
Only the fading glow of their flashlights can be seen.
And a beep sounds from the opaque interior of the school.
These are the dead man's devices, mobile signal transmitters that every rescuer wears.
They indicate acoustically if the firefighter does not move for a certain period of time - for example because something happened to him during an interior attack or because the oxygen tank is empty.
Life insurance for the rescuers.
"The protection of the firefighters is extremely important, because if something happens to them, no more victims can be saved," explains Richard Obermayer, Deputy Commander of the Holzkirchner Wehr.
The teams that have meanwhile arrived from Föching, Hartpenning, Otterfing, Feldkirchen-Westerham, Valley and Warngau are also wearing these devices.
Some emergency services enter the school building via a turntable ladder.
They receive their orders from their section leader.
In such a scenario, there are several of them, each coordinating the deployment in a specific area.
An orderly chain of command and a good flow of information are essential for the success of a fire brigade operation, Obermayer makes clear.
+
Rescue workers from the BRK and emergency doctor Veronika Lingg will also take part in the exercise on Friday.
© Thomas Plettenberg
Rescue workers must classify injuries
This also applies to the rescue workers of the Bavarian Red Cross (BRK).
When the first victims have been rescued and transported to the schoolyard, hurry is required: a team examines the injured and divides them into categories.
Those who receive “green” do not require any treatment for the time being.
Red cards lie next to the four seriously injured.
Their lives are threatened, some of them are moaning loudly.
Like everything on this evening, this is also an act: one has broken glass deep into his chest, others lie unconscious, they are connected to an electrocardiograph.
Senior emergency doctor Veronika Lingg has to decide: who should be transported first?
Who needs additional care on site?
The organization of the rescue is complex, but the operation works well here as well, as the on-call manager Elisabeth Proisl and Martin Herbig, head of the rapid response group support, from the BRJK Holzkirchen judge.
Get ready for the next mission
The exercise is over after a good 90 minutes and the emergency vehicles leave the scene.
An assignment does not end there.
Back at the station, the vehicles have to be made ready again immediately.
A new alarm can arrive at any time.
The end of the exercise showed how quickly this can happen: the emergency doctor Lingg was called while the building was still being dismantled.
part of the scenario?
No, this time it's real: a viewer has suffered a circulatory collapse.
The Holzkirchner rescue service works here too: the fire brigade and emergency doctor quickly get the person back on their feet.
Andreas Wolkenstein
