Their work has become more difficult: firefighters are obstructed in the fire extinguishing gazers, paramedics are mobbed when they want to provide for injured.
„We experience disrespect every day, but we also enjoy every day respect and reputation,“ says the spokesman for Germany’s largest professional fire department in Berlin, Frederic Finner.
To make the work of the task forces transparent, to interest prospective offspring and to show what kind of mass of emergency calls has to be mastered every day – this is the concern of 41 professional fire brigades that start a „Twitter storm“ this Monday. These include Hamburg, Munich, Dusseldorf and Bremen.
Although it is no longer new to spread information via Twitter. But nonstop twelve hours (from 8:00 clock) live to inform about everything, the fire brigades manage otherwise not to the extent. For the first time, fire brigades will be tweeting at the same time.
Again and again, emergency services are annoyed that they are called to emergencies that are not. The clogged toilet is clearly not in the emergency call category, it says in Berlin. Some callers also try to get to the doctor faster with the ambulance.
In Berlin alone, the fire brigade moved to more than 458,000 missions in 2017, almost 4,000 more than a year earlier. Since 2009, the number has continued to rise, had informed the Chief Fire Chief Karsten Homrighausen. The number of false alarms is also increasing.
And there are stark cases that only cause horror. At the beginning of February, an ambulance and two fire brigade paramedics were only able to provide a patient in Berlin-Kreuzberg with police protection. They had been attacked and first had to flee to their ambulance.
Nevertheless, „our strategy is de-escalation,“ says fire brigade spokesman Finner. In the meantime, task forces have also been trained to behave in „assault situations“. De-escalation training is an integral part of the training.
But there are limits: „Spitting overruns any tolerance.“ The spokesman appealed to his colleagues to report such incidents. „On New Year’s Eve we put everything on display.“ Only then could it be prosecuted. In addition, firefighters have long been complaining about their high load.
In addition, there are a number of outdated firefighting vehicles and ambulances in the German capital. Many are 20 years or older. In the case of the fire-fighting trains, the default rate in 2018 was a good 17 percent, in peak months even more than 21 percent. One fifth of the around 190 fire fighting vehicles were not available – especially because of long workshop stays.
