Around 150 hectares of forest are already on fire on the Brocken. A spokesman for the authorities explained that the fire continued to spread in some places during the night. Helicopters and firefighting aircraft are now to fight the fire on the difficult-to-access site.
The major fire on the Brocken in the Harz Mountains is still not under control on the third day. That said a spokesman for the Harz district in Wernigerode. In some places, the fire is said to have spread further. In the morning, the district announced that the fire had not spread further during the night. The authorities therefore continue to assume a burning area totaling around 150 hectares (1.5 square kilometers).
Fire-fighting planes and helicopters should take off in the morning. To do this, the time window for the water drops would have to be coordinated, said the spokesman. Therefore, a second technical operations management was set up. According to the district administration, the federal police and armed forces are providing support with mobile filling stations for refueling aircraft. The Braunschweig fire brigade and Braunschweig airport refuel the fire-fighting aircraft.
A no-fly zone for civil air traffic had previously been set up on the Brocken within a radius of 40 kilometers. This is difficult-to-access terrain in the Harz National Park, on which there are many dead spruce trees. Five fire-fighting helicopters and two Italian fire-fighting planes had already helped fight the flames on Sunday.
The Harz district assumes that the extinguishing work will take several days. Among other things, there is support from the Bundeswehr, the Federal Police, the state police of Saxony-Anhalt and Lower Saxony and the Federal Agency for Technical Relief (THW). Several hundred emergency services help. The Ministry of the Interior in Magdeburg thanked everyone who is working tirelessly to contain the forest fire.
The fire was discovered on Saturday around 2:30 p.m. on the so-called Goetheweg near the Goethebahnhof vantage point. The Brocken plateau, on which a hotel and a train station are located, among other things, was then evacuated. It will remain closed to visitors until further notice, as will the hiking trails in the area. The Harz narrow-gauge railways, which run their trains on the Brocken, have stopped operating there. The cause of the fire is still unclear.
