A fire broke out on the premises of the waste disposal company Vivo in the north of Warngau on Wednesday morning.
Old photovoltaic modules stored in a basement caught fire.
Firefighters quickly got the flames under control.
Warngau
– Dense smoke billowed from the storage cellar, and the rescue workers were greeted by a pungent stench: in a factory building belonging to Vivo, the district’s waste disposal company in the north of the municipality of Warngau, a stack of old photovoltaic modules.
A large number of firefighters managed to quickly extinguish the fire and prevent the flames from spreading to the neighboring garbage compactor.
Fire investigators from the Kripo Miesbach are on site to clarify the cause of the fire.
As district fire inspector Andreas Schwabenbauer reports on request, an automatic fire alarm system went on at around 7:25 a.m.
Shortly thereafter, Vivo employees confirmed that thick smoke was coming from the large storage room, which also houses the Vivo's waste transfer compactor.
The fire brigades Warngau, Holzkirchen, Hartpenning, Föching and Feldkirchen-Westerham moved out, a total of 84 active people were deployed.
The people from Feldkirch brought a second turntable ladder with them, which, according to Schwabenbauer, is always available in the event of fires in industrial buildings.
However, the turntable ladders were not used, the location turned out to be a large, dark storage room that could be reached at ground level.
"It was a smoldering fire with extremely heavy smoke," explains Schwabenbauer, who acted as operations manager.
The smoke and stench were so great that the rescue teams could only approach the seat of the fire with breathing apparatus.
According to Schwabenbauer, the acrid fumes posed no danger to employees or the general public.
Next to the large compactor in which the VIVO compacts the collected household waste for onward transport, the breathing protection teams had to penetrate into the rear part of the dark storage room.
Discarded photovoltaic modules that had caught fire were stored there.
"We took the fire material outside and extinguished it there," says Schwabenbauer.
The operation ended at around 8:40 a.m.
The BRK, which had arrived with several ambulances as a precaution, did not have to act.
How the modules caught fire is still unclear.
The first signs point to a technical defect in the electrical wiring.
There is no information yet on the amount of property damage.
