Field fire near Vienna Airport: 120 emergency personnel battle flames for six hours

Emergency personnel and casualties

Due to the persistent heat and the physically demanding work, six firefighters had to be treated by the Red Cross. Two of them were, according to the Mannswörth fire brigade, "zur weiteren Abklärung ins Krankenhaus gebracht". No further details were initially known about the severity of the heat-related complaints.

The affected area was located in the immediate vicinity of Vienna Airport, which made the coordination of the operation additionally difficult. The B10 is an important connecting road in the region east of Vienna; whether and for how long traffic was affected by the operation does not emerge from the available information.

Possible causes and consequences

Windbreak belts, which were also affected, typically serve in the region to protect adjacent agricultural land from erosion and wind. The loss of several hundred metres of these strips of woodland represents not only ecological damage, but can also have long-term effects on the soil structure and adjacent fields.

The emergency services initially provided no information on the cause of the fire. Field and grassland fires frequently occur in Lower Austria during the summer months due to sparks from machinery, discarded objects or even spontaneous combustion during extreme heat. Investigations into the exact cause were still ongoing at the time of the report.

The Mannswörth fire brigade expressly thanked the farmer from the local area for his support. The spontaneous deployment with the cultivator had shown how important cooperation between agriculture and emergency services is in such large-area fires. The Red Cross was on site throughout the entire operation to provide medical backup.

Overall, the operation shows the scale that an apparently limited field fire can assume: 35 hectares correspond to around 35 football pitches, on which grain or other crops were completely destroyed. According to the emergency services' assessment, the cleanup work and the assessment of damage to soils and windbreak strips will take several more days.