Eight residents were seriously injured in an apartment fire in Berlin on Tuesday night – two of them life-threatening. As the Berlin fire brigade announced on Tuesday, there was a fire in an apartment on the first floor of a six-storey apartment building. Two residents jumped out of the burning apartment before the arrival of the fire brigade and injured themselves life-threateningly, as a spokesman for the fire brigade reported.
Two other people were apparently able to save themselves via a neighbor's ladder. The occupant of the ground floor noticed two people on the balcony of the burning apartment and hired a ladder to the rescue, the fire department said on Twitter. Smoke detectors had made many tenants aware of the fire before the fire brigade arrived and were able to leave the house in time.
According to the information, the fire also spread to the apartments above. Two people were seriously injured and rescued from the second floor of the apartment building, and four others were also seriously injured from the stairwell. "One person had to be resuscitated," the fire department tweeted in the morning. The injured were taken to a hospital.
145 firefighters were on site and extinguished the flames. Around 30 residents were cared for with the help of a care bus. The extinguishing work continued in the morning. It is still unclear how the fire started.