The emergency call to a fire in progress on the evening of Sunday, July 24, 2016 turned out to be a nightmare for the fire brigade of Kressbronn, located close to Lake Constance in Germany. When the brigade arrived at the incident location, its own equipment house, a major portion of the building that which stored among other things the brigade's equipment and vehicles was already in flames. After the fire was extinguished by neighboring fire brigades, the outlook for the Kressbronn fire brigade was more than sobering: In addition to the substantial financial damages amounting to several million Euros, the majority of the equipment house was destroyed. Three of the brigade's eight vehicles were severely damaged, four burned out completely. Only one team vehicle escaped the blaze unharmed.
In order to restore the fire brigade's ability to respond as soon as possible, Magirus provided the fire brigade with a turntable ladder on short notice. On Thursday, only four days after fire, several comrades from the fire brigade visited the Magirus Excellence Center in Ulm to pick up the vehicle. The turntable ladder is an M32L-AT articulated ladder truck with a unique three-axle chassis, as presented for the first time ever at the Interschutz 2015. The concept with a steerable third axle and significantly smaller turning radius offers outstanding possibilities: It has excellent maneuverability with reduction of the load on the rear axles and is currently the only series vehicle to feature a Euro 6 engine.
The turntable ladder was already put into service on Thursday evening. Thanks to the ad-hoc gesture by Magirus and the broad support of fire brigades and fire-fighting associations, the town government and many volunteers, fire protection has in the meantime been restored in the town of Kressbronn.
