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Fire rips through explosives-littered German forest
SCHWERIN, Germany, July 2, 2019 (BSS/AFP) – German fire-fighters were
Tuesday battling a huge forest blaze ripping through a former military
training area littered with unexploded munitions dating back to the Nazi era.
Hundreds of emergency personnel — backed by helicopters, army vehicles
and police water canon — have been fighting the flames and evacuated four
nearby villages with a total of over 1,000 residents in Mecklenburg-Western
Pomerania state.
The acrid smell from the blaze, the largest recorded in the ex-communist
northeastern state, has drifted as far as Berlin, 200 kilometres (125 miles)
away, as much of Europe swelters in blistering summer temperatures.
The German army on Tuesday sent in armoured vehicles to clear pathways of
dangerous unexploded ordnance (UXO) so that fire engines can enter the
burning region that measured some 600 hectares (1,400 acres).
The former military training ground near the town of Luebtheen is littered
with bombs, grenades and bullets from the Nazi era’s Wehrmacht, the former
Soviet army, and from reunited Germany’s Bundeswehr.
Tests in the past had unearthed more than 45 tonnes of UXO per hectare,
state environment minister Till Backhaus told local newspaper the Ostsee
Zeitung, adding: “I pray to God that he sends us rain, as quickly as
possible.”
BSS/AFP/FI/ 1812 hrs