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Video of a dramatic rescue by firefighters attending an apartment fire in the German capital has gone viral and is now being reported around the world.
When the fire brigade arrived at around 6.30 am on Friday, the woman was already sitting on the outside windowsill of her burning flat on the eleventh floor of a tower block in Friedrichshain, regional public broadcaster Rundfunk Berlin Brandenburg (RBB) reported.
“It really was touch and go,” a fire service spokesperson said, pointing out that the Berlin fire brigade’s turntable ladder only reached up to about the ninth floor of the 21-storey building.
Smoke had already spread so extensively through the building that hundreds of residents had to be led outside via the stairwell by firefighters and 13 people were injured.
Video of the rescue goes viral
And the footage of the dramatic rescue on 14 August has now gone viral.
On X, the video posted by user ColdJack has been viewed more than 3.3 million times and reposted countless times.
The woman has to jump several metres down into the basket of the fire brigade’s turntable ladder. She hesitates for a long time before she finally dared make the leap.
The video shows how the woman made the two-storey drop and land safely in the basket of the ladder next to a firefighter.
According to the Berlin fire brigade, 116 emergency personnel were deployed to the incident.
After around five hours, the scene of the fire at the tower block was handed over to the police to investigate the cause.
The footage of the rescue is so spectacular that images of the fire in Berlin, in which fortunately no one was seriously injured, have now been picked up by media outlets across the globe.
But the fire service spokesperson, reflecting on the dramatic operation, said: “That’s not something you need to experience every day.”
Additional sources • AP, RBB