Residents in northern Romania survey damage after massive fire is extinguished

People said they had to try to tackle the fire themselves to protect their homes until firefighters were able to reach the scene and put it out.

Transcript

00:00Residents in Maramureș, in northern Romania, have been surveying the damage after a massive

00:07fire in the area was extinguished. Six warehouses have been reduced to ashes and entire orchards

00:14have been destroyed in the blaze that broke out on Saturday. Locals said the fire started

00:19suddenly and quickly intensified before spreading to houses.

00:24I was scared. I called 112 and they started asking me how many metres the fire was from.

00:30I said 30 metres.

00:32The Ministry of Internal Affairs said on Saturday that 90 people had been evacuated from the

00:37area. People said they had tried to tackle the fire themselves to protect their homes

00:42until firefighters were able to reach the scene and put it out.

00:47With shovels and everything else we could do, with water pumps and everything we had here,

00:52we managed to put it out so that it wouldn't come back here.

00:56Luckily there was a fire extinguisher here, because if there was a fire, we would have burned.

01:00More than 250 firefighters from Maramureș and neighbouring counties were mobilised to

01:06extinguish the fire. The General Inspectorate for Emergency Situations believed the fire

01:11started on an area of dry vegetation and quickly got out of control. But authorities

01:16don't yet know how it started and have opened an investigation to determine the cause.