Seventy guests evacuated at Brand in Feestzaal during Trouw, firefighter slightly injured (Sint-Pieters-Leeuw)

The facts took place at Salle Delia in the Fabriekstraat, which used to go through life as a Room Concordia and later Salle New Concordia. It was shortly after 10.15 pm that the emergency services were called. « According to the first call, a Smeulbrand raged in a party room where a wedding party was going on at that time, » says Wouter Jeanfils from the Flemish Brabant West Fire Zone. « When our services arrived on the spot, about seventy people present had already taken themselves to safety. They were then all able to leave on their own. »

Extinguishing the fire had a lot of feet in the earth. « In the first instance, it was established that a fire had broken out in the rear part of the building, where there is a technical room, » Jeanfils knows. « We suspect that the fire broke out there, at the height of an electricity cabinet. Through there the fire moved up towards the roof trusses. »

And that made it difficult to put out. There is a space between the ceiling of the party room and the roof trusses that was not accessible. There was, among other things, insulation. « Indeed, it was not easy to access certain parts, » the firefighter continues. « In the meantime, the fire continued to smolder in the roof and had already spread to the front. For the sake of collapse of the ceiling, it was also too dangerous to send people inside. »

That is why openings were made in the roof to extinguish the fire from the outside. Part of the ceiling in the building also actually came down. One fire brigade was slightly injured and had to be taken to the hospital. It is not clear in what circumstances he was injured.

Due to the size of the fire and the difficult accessibility, the fire brigade was immediately scaled up. « The fire brigade intervention plan was started, so that a command post was set up on the spot, » it sounds. « Because we needed enough water in view of the circumstances, extra tankers were immediately called up. They came not only from our zone, but also from Brussels, from the Denderleeuw post of the South East Flanders zone and from the post Tubeke of the Walloon Brabant aid zone. In total, it involved nine tankers. »

The fire brigade eventually needed three hours to fully control the fire. A drone was also used during the intervention. It had to be further extinguished until well into the night.