“Such a day? You will never forget that”: 50 years ago, five firefighters died in rescue with helicopter

“I saw them falling and hoping it would be fine, but the reality was horribly different.” It will be exactly 50 years ago on Tuesday that four firefighters and a colleague of the civil protection died after a failed rescue with a helicopter in Walem near Mechelen. A reconstruction of the most jet -black day in the history of the Mechelen fire brigade on the basis of eyewitnesses, colleagues and the son of one of the deceased pompiers. “We hoped that they would fall into the water, they would have had another chance.”

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