Firefighters were alerted to almost 1,900 cases in 2022 – most often from the central part of the country – and a total of about 130 tons of various types of explosive devices, ammunition, and hazardous materials of military origin were destroyed, the 1st Firefighter Regiment of the Hungarian Armed Forces announced on Facebook on Monday.
In the post evaluating last year, it was written that 1,872 police reports were received by the fire engineer of the Hungarian Defense Forces, typically related to dangerous explosive devices left over from the Second World War, of which 387 times “out-of-order treatment” of explosives was required.
It was announced: Fejér county received the most notifications, 330, in a “tie”, and the soldiers of the regiment were also alerted about the same number of addresses in Pest county and Budapest. Firefighters marched 170 times to locations belonging to the county of Veszprém, to explosive devices of military origin.
The number of police reports requiring emergency response was the highest in the capital and Pest County, where soldiers of the unit took action 140 times within 24 hours. Firefighters went to Fejér County in 65 cases and to Komárom-Esztergom County in 25 cases.
It was noted in the post: typically different types of mortar and artillery grenades, hand grenades, and ammunition were found.
The most frequently found type of explosive device this year was also the 82-millimeter Soviet shrapnel grenade, of which almost 1,900 pieces were “handled” by firefighters across the country. The incendiaries disposed of about a thousand pieces of the 81-millimeter German shrapnel grenade, more than a thousand of the 75-millimeter German anti-tank and shrapnel grenades, and 450 of the Soviet F1 defensive hand grenades were disposed of by the soldiers of the incendiary regiment.
According to the report, the firefighters destroyed a total of about 130 tons of various types of explosive devices, ammunition, and dangerous materials of military origin. Destruction by controlled explosions was carried out 483 times in the blasting areas designated for it, during the controlled destructions almost one ton of TNT and Semtex-type explosives were used.
The explosives detection dog handlers of the regiment carried out 117 on-site inspections with service dogs, and in 93 cases they provided fire protection for military operations, shooting exercises, and civilian activities, they wrote.
In the post, Colonel Zsolt Szilágyi, the regiment commander, was quoted, as calling the last year of the regiment extremely busy.
MTI
Photo: Firefighters are preparing to remove and defuse a World War II, hundred-kilogram, Soviet-made aerial bomb on the section between the Erzsébet Danube Bridge and the Chain Bridge, near the Várkert Bazaar, on September 12, 2022. The area around it was sealed off in a radius of four hundred meters. MTI/Péter Lakatos
