How long will this be good? The message reached all firefighters on Tuesday at 8:02 p.m. on their operational displays: “Currently only 1 RTW available for the whole of Berlin!”
By Axel Lier
The sender of the message: the control center of the Berlin fire brigade.
Only one of 150 ambulances for a capital with 3.8 million inhabitants? “It’s no longer a rarity,” confirmed a firefighter from the BZ
His colleagues report that they also had difficulties getting their patients into emergency rooms that same evening: “Several hospitals have unsubscribed from us. Their rescue centers were closed. We called three or four emergency rooms before we could hand our patients over.”
The authorities admit the emergency. But you only existed “for a brief moment”, according to a spokesman. “Within a few minutes, more than 19 emergency services could be alerted again.” The situation on Tuesday evening was an exception, “which was due to a short-term accumulation of simultaneous operations”.
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For real? More than 1200 rescue service calls a day are for the Berlin fire department now common.
For years, the authority has been struggling more and more often with a state of emergency in the emergency services. It is often called out twice a day – almost unnoticed by the public. The ambulances are then 80 percent full and the specified arrival time of ten minutes can hardly be met.
The facts: The “emergency emergency service” was called out exactly 64 times in 2020, 178 times last year and 85 times by mid-April. So the trend is rising.
