Großhau was lucky because the fire that broke out on Thursday spread in the other direction, towards the neighboring settlement of Gey. Therefore, Großhau did not have to be evacuated, unlike Gey. The police and fire brigade rang the more than 2,000 residents out of bed on Friday night. To be on the safe side. A nursing home and a horse stud were also evacuated. The decision was made at four in the morning and the rescue was completed by eight o'clock.
On Saturday morning it was said that the forest fire had not spread any further. “Our strategy for the night worked,” said district fire chief Karlheinz Eisnar to the dpa news agency. “We were able to hold the flanks.” However, this is also thanks to the weather. There was hardly any wind. The flames are still 150 to 200 meters away from Gey; the village, like Großhau, belongs to Hürtgenwald, a municipality with 9,000 inhabitants near the Belgian border. The burning forest is called the same.
The people brought to safety from Gey were initially accommodated in a primary school and a rifle shelter nearby. Many then quickly found shelter with friends or relatives, others were taken to more distant accommodation because the exposure to the smoke became too much. Clouds even moved as far as Bonn, 50 kilometers to the east. During her visit to Hürtgenwald, Silke Gorißen, the federal state's Minister of Agriculture, called the columns of smoke that were visible from afar “a bit apocalyptic”.
Hürtgenwald's mayor Stephan Cranen is on constant duty as a crisis manager. The independent 55-year-old can therefore only be reached on his cell phone. “There were two other fires on Thursday, but they weren’t that bad,” he says. When he was on his way to the second one in the afternoon, he found out about the third, larger one. "And just as I was about to go to bed, the wind changed. We then decided to evacuate." He still hasn't had time to sleep.
Hürtgenwald belongs to the Düren district. Its district administrator Ralf Nolten says there was no resistance to the evacuation: "If you saw the wall of fire - the trees are already at their height and then it burns a few meters above the top - if you saw that, then go ahead and don't start discussing."
The cause of the fire in the North Eifel, a popular excursion region and part of a national park, is unclear. The Cologne police are investigating. The fire has now developed into a feared treetop fire in the bone-dry forest. This means that the fire takes on a life of its own in the crowns, jumps from treetop to treetop and can therefore outpace the fire on the ground. The heat and strong winds from changing directions make extinguishing the fire difficult. A fire department spokesman says the conditions are “extremely bad.” According to his estimates, 300 hectares are burning, which is the size of 420 football fields. For comparison: Only 52 hectares of forest burned down in all of North Rhine-Westphalia last year. According to everything the government knows, the fire in Hürtgenwald is the worst in the history of the most populous federal state.
The fire-fighting work is made even more difficult because ammunition and mines from the Second World War are hidden in the forest floor. The ancient forest was the scene of one of the longest and bloodiest battles on the Western Front in late 1944 and early 1945. The US Army wanted to advance through the Eifel, but the Wehrmacht had entrenched itself. US soldiers called the forest Death Factory. Emergency services already heard explosions. CDU District Administrator Nolten says that because of this danger, individual firefighters cannot be sent into the forest with fire-fighting backpacks. On Friday night, individual units also had to withdraw so that they would not be surrounded by fire.
A total of up to 1,400 people are deployed, including Bundeswehr soldiers. In response to the risk of explosions, fire fighters are relying more on heavy equipment and extinguishing from greater distances. Two Bundeswehr tank clearing vehicles cut paths into the forest, and the police sprayed the trees with water cannons. A special vehicle called the Fire Fighter, which has just been purchased by the state government, is also in use. It is capable of off-road use, can overcome steep slopes and spray 10,000 liters of fire-fighting water from a tank. Five police and Bundeswehr helicopters with huge water tanks are fighting the fire from the air. Mayor Cranen says on the phone that a firefighting plane has been requested that can transport more water. The firefighters are now also using counterfire as a strategy: fires are lit in certain places, which deprive the larger fire of food, as a fire department spokesman says.
On Saturday night, the deployment of personnel on the ground in particularly vulnerable areas was almost doubled, as the spokesman for the fire brigades in the Düren district, Peter Berndgen, told the German Press Agency. Many additional fire brigades were led to these areas. Two Bundeswehr recovery tanks cut further paths in the area of the Gey district during the night.
Every twelve hours, around 500 emergency services from North Rhine-Westphalia head to the fire area for a shift change. The operational planning currently extends until Monday. Even if the fire is soon under control, firefighters will then have to carefully extinguish all embers across 300 hectares to prevent a new fire from starting. It is also unclear how quickly the residents will be allowed to return to their evacuated village. This Saturday, Prime Minister Hendrik Wüst will visit Hürtgenwald; he ended his vacation early. Mayor Cranen had actually planned a bike ride for this weekend. “But I already told my wife to cancel it,” he reports. “We will definitely be needed here for a few more days.”
