welcome
at the Nieder-Ofleiden fire department
about us
Operations department
According to the Hessian Law on Fire Protection, Disaster Protection and General Aid (HBKG), the municipalities are responsible for ensuring fire protection and general aid.
Every city / municipality is therefore obliged to set up a fire brigade. This must only be a professional fire brigade for cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants.
For smaller cities and municipalities, it would be unthinkable for financial reasons
to set up fire brigades with full-time staff, including in Homberg (Ohm), where 14 voluntary fire brigades currently ensure fire protection for the larger community.
One of these district fire brigades is the Nieder-Ofleiden volunteer fire brigade, where 34 volunteers, including 8 firefighters, have volunteered to help fellow citizens of our large community, 365 days a year, 24 hours a day to be and to help when in need.
Fall arrest group
The fall arrest / fall protection group was founded on January 22nd, 2014 and is the youngest specialist group within the Homberger fire brigade.
They had to be set up because the fire brigade, with the equipment and training available up to that point, had reached its limits when working in the area at risk of falling and when securing people at great heights. Furthermore, the fire brigade accident insurance fund and the fire service regulations have long been calling for such fall protection to be taken into account.
In longer preliminary discussions it emerged that this task should be carried out by the fire brigades Nieder-Ofleiden and Ober-Ofleiden, as well as interested emergency personnel from the city districts, since there are several commercial objects in the area of responsibility of our fire brigade that pose dangers as potential locations
The fall arrest / fall arrest group, which should not be confused with height rescue, is currently still under construction and will probably be ready for use by the middle of the year. The first emergency personnel already completed a course in fall protection at the state fire brigade school, which will be followed by further emergency personnel.
The future fall protection group will be alerted via the Vogelsbergkreis control center in Lauterbach
Tasks and uses
The main task of the group is to carry out work and personal security at great heights or depths and in areas where there is a risk of falling. Great emphasis is placed on differentiating between fall protection and height rescue.
The fall protection of the Nieder-Ofleiden and Ober-Ofleiden fire brigades will only secure people and, if necessary, provide medical care until, for example, height rescuers from Gießen, Frankfurt, Kassel or another Hessian location arrive with rescuers at the site and undertake the rescue
Possible uses of our group are:
- Rescue of people from shafts and construction pits
- Personal security on scaffolding, construction cranes etc.
- Animal rescue from trees and other tall buildings
- Working on roofs after storms
- Securing parts at risk of falling that cannot be reached with the turntable ladder
- Open the roof skin after a roof truss fire in order to remove embers
- Working in the event of fires inside high silos
Education and training
Each member of the respective deployment department will undergo several hours of training in the basics of fall protection and learn absolutely safe handling of knots and stitches, as well as the correct handling of the equipment in order to support the fall protection personnel trained at the state fire brigade school. It is then deployed in the rendevouz process, which means that the entire fire department Nieder-Ofleiden, the fire department Ober-Ofleiden, as well as at least the turntable ladder and the rescue vehicle of the fire department Homberg are alerted. That means that there can also be mixed operations by the fire departments involved. Therefore, in future there will be several joint exercises for height safety, the three fire departments.
Youth fire brigade
With the blue lights on, the emergency vehicle stops in front of a large warehouse in the industrial park. “Sit down the team!” is the command of the group leader, whereupon 8 young people leave the fire engine and position themselves in front of the vehicle to implement the instructions of the group leader "water supply underground hydrant, distributor 20 meters straight, attack group with the first pipe on the direct way to fight the fire" is the instruction of the group leader, whereupon everyone runs to the fire truck, routinely opens the shutters, takes out the necessary fittings and equipment and then implements the instructions of the group leader.
The water supply is quickly established. The first attack -
trupp has water on the jet pipe and starts fighting the fire. Now further hose lines are laid until all three troops have water on the pipe and fight the fictitious building fire. The training service of the youth fire brigade runs like this or something similar, to which the young people always meet on Mondays from 7:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m.
Unfortunately, no young people have been able to find their way to the youth fire brigade recently, so we have decided to temporarily suspend youth work until more young people can be found to be able to carry out effective and goal-oriented training.
Fire Brigade Association
The Verein Freiwillige Feuerwehr Nieder-Ofleiden eV brings together all active, passive and supporting members.
The association Freiwillige Feuerwehr Nieder-Ofleiden eV has the task of supporting the operational department at events, as well as on acquisitions that cannot be carried out by the public sector, with financial means or with work assignments.
Numerous items of equipment, such as T-shirts and sweat shirts for the emergency department, the youth fire department and the marching team, power generators and lighting equipment, trailers or even emergency vehicles, to name just a few, have already been acquired.
The association is led by Harald Wiegand and Thomas Stein, the secretary Sybille Naumann Pfeil, computer: Michaela Dörr, assessor: Christian Hochgrebe and Bernd Wagner.
The association “Freiwillige Feuerwehr Nieder-Ofleiden eV” was founded on July 8, 1950, in the former inn Guntrum. In order to win enough residents for the “fire brigade cause”, a keg of beer was put on and it was stipulated that anyone who wanted to drink from this keg had to become a member of the newly founded association. In the end, 80 people drank from the barrel, so that 48 active and 32 passive members were available on the evening of the foundation. Heinrich Hermann Zinnkann and Karl Müller sen were elected 1st local fire chief. Furthermore, it was determined that every second Monday in the month one would want to meet at the syringe training center, which has been maintained until today.
After the young club had established itself in local affairs, the then still independent municipality of Nieder-Ofleiden, a trailer for the existing engine syringe from the times of the then “Löschverband Ohmtal, (association of neighboring weirs and predecessors of the club) became a trailer procured to be faster at fires in the event of fire.
The first major test was in 1954 when they were called to a major fire in Erbenhausen. A year later, you had to fight a major fire in your own town when the Parma family home was on fire. Despite a massive fire-fighting mission, the fire could not be contained, so that the house burned down to the ground.
Another major fire occurred during the annual general meeting in 1958 when the furniture joinery Konrad Pfeil burned. Here, too, the fire in the building could not be contained, so that the carpentry burned down to the ground.
This fire was also the reason for the community to improve the equipment of the fire brigade and so in the same year a new portable pump and trailer were put into service.
Since the syringe house at that time was anything but contemporary accommodation, the construction of a modern fire-fighting equipment house with an attached community building yard and village community center was started in 1963. In two construction phases, 2 vehicle halls for the fire brigade and 2 vehicle halls for the construction yard were built. After the construction of a large fire water cistern in Hochrainstrasse, the fire brigade received the first real emergency vehicle in 1965, a portable pump on a Ford BK 1000 chassis, and two handheld radios were purchased in 1967, which was an absolute novelty at the time.
The signs of the times were recognized early on and were also pioneers in youth work and so in 1970 a youth fire brigade was founded in Nieder-Ofleiden.
With the establishment of several commercial operations in the town, the requirements for the fire brigade also increased, so that in 1976 a replacement for the TSF was due and an LF 8 was put into service.
A used VW bus from Kamax Werke and a hose trailer were procured from the fire brigade association and converted in-house for the needs of our fire brigade.
There were always fires in the commercial operations of our community, which almost always went off lightly due to the good equipment and the speed of the fire brigade and showed the importance of a well-functioning village fire brigade.
The worst ever operation in the history of our fire brigade was called on June 28, 1984, when a residential building burned in the densely built-up town of Homberg and two residents were still missing. Despite a massive fire-fighting attack by the fire brigades from Homberg, Ober-Ofleiden, Gontershausen, Haarhausen and Nieder-Ofleiden, the residents of the building were not able to save.
The biggest and most significant day in the fifty-year history of the Nieder-Ofleiden fire brigade was May 17, 2009, when the MTF and LF 8/6 emergency vehicles and the converted rooms for the youth fire brigade went into service as part of an “open house” and the operations department could be inaugurated.
Actually, one should have taken over an LF 10/6 fire-fighting group vehicle from the civil protection, but because of its enormous size it would not have fit into the fire-fighting equipment house. However, since the importance of such a vehicle for the large community was recognized, the plan for a vehicle exchange with the base fire brigade, with which there is a very good relationship, matured and was implemented.
Over the decades, the fire brigade association has held many events, such as the city fire brigade days in 1980 and 1990, the village festival with village Olympics, the burning down of the May fire and much more. Today the fire brigade association is an important pillar of the village community and an integral part of the village life. All of our association's activities serve to promote fire protection in our area and the proceeds go to a large extent to the operations department.
