Bert and his colleagues have to help search for wounded and possibly even kill. “I already saw images of an earthquake in front of me, where we would pull people away from the rubble. So the tension was over.”
According to Bert, they were the ‘second ring’, because most homes had already been searched at that time. “But there were still many houses that the doors were still closed,” he says. “We went into the neighborhood with a few police and firefighters in groups. We started searching burned-out cars, then homes. Many people were still missing, but how many, they did not fully map that.”
Bert himself finds no victims, but some colleagues of his have seen nasty things. “What made the most impression on me was the total destruction,” he describes. “There were terraced houses in the neighborhood, but there were still a few walls or here and there a chimney.”
Nowadays Bert is a professional fire brigade, but not yet in the year 2000. “We were all citizens. The one was a painter, the other was a carpenter and I was a farmer. You experience everything together, but this destruction …”
After the photo, read how Fireman Wout Oord looks back on that day