Thick clouds of smoke moved over the Grunewald into the Berlin sky on Thursday Photo: picture alliance/dpa/Kay Nietfeld/Ralph Günther
By Andreas Vollbrechtshausen
Now the forests are also burning in Berlin. And it won’t be the last catastrophe. A comment from BZ editor Andreas Vollbrechtshausen.
It is frightening. The fiery inferno is getting closer. First forest fires on the border with Saxony, in Beelitz sanatoriums, in the Lieberoser Heide, in Treuenbrietzen, Jüterbog.
And on Thursday now the explosive site in Grunewald. There are currently 25 tons of explosives stored there. If it blows up, the situation can quickly spiral out of control. And that at a distance of a good 13 kilometers as the crow flies from Alexanderplatz.
The risk of forest fires cannot be averted in the short term. Now it’s taking its toll that countermeasures weren’t taken much earlier. Because these conflagrations do not come as a surprise. Long periods of drought – we witnessed them – and hoped that it wouldn’t be that bad. But now it has gotten bad.
The conversion of the forest is now under discussion, away from monocultures of spruce and pine to mixed forests. Why wasn’t this pushed a long time ago? Because that does not happen overnight, it is rather a task for several generations.
Above all, politics must improve when it comes to crisis management; be it with the flood tragedy in the Ahr valley, with the pandemic management or with burning forests. That’s better!
