Firefighters fight a forest fire in Falkenberg (archive photo) Photo: Jan Woitas/dpa
From BZ/dpa
Officially, the forest fire season does not end until the end of October, but in Brandenburg it is already clear that the damage is immense.
According to a report by Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg (RBB), the Ministry of the Environment in Potsdam estimates the damage caused by forest fires at 11 to 14 million euros. Reforestation costs are not included.
According to the ministry’s data, a total of 501 forest fires were counted in 2022, more than in the past ten years.
1,411 hectares of forest were damaged or destroyed – three and a half times the average of the past ten years. The damage in terms of area was larger only in the forest fire record year 2018, in which 1664 hectares were affected.
Large fires in 2022 also repeatedly threatened settlements in the immediate vicinity of the forest. According to the media report, at least seven towns and parts of Beelitz were evacuated.
When asked by RBB, a spokeswoman for the Ministry of the Interior said that evacuations were not recorded statistically, but only three other evacuations were known from the past few years, which were ordered as a result of the first major forest fire near Treuenbrietzen in 2018.