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A hospital technician in Wannsee noticed diesel fumes from an emergency generator running after a grid power outage. The generator’s limitations required cancelling surgical procedures, and extended operation raised uncertainty despite regular testing. The hospital had about 3,000 litres of diesel, with an estimated burn rate of 550 litres per day, and the outage was expected to last until the end of the following week. The technician was sent to obtain additional diesel from a nearby petrol station still connected to the grid, while a neighbouring hospice planned to transfer patients to the hospital. The outage was caused by arson that set fire to five high-voltage cables under a bridge over the Teltow canal, a vulnerable point for underground cable networks.

"Sebastian Brandt, chief technician of the Immanuel hospital in the leafy, affluent Wannsee district of Berlin, guessed something was wrong as soon as he opened the window of his home and smelled diesel. It was 3 January, a freezing Saturday morning, and luckily the hospital opposite had relatively few patients on this post-holiday weekend. As he looked out, the diesel fumes told him that the emergency generator a huge, deafening, decades-old machine in the basement had kicked in. That meant the hospital was no longer getting power from the grid. And that meant Brandt was not going to have a quiet weekend."

"Although an emergency generator keeps a hospital running, it has its limitations. Surgical procedures have to be cancelled, and though generators are tested regularly, no one can be certain what will happen when they are kept running for days on end. The generator tank in the Immanuel hospital contained about 3,000 litres of diesel, and Brandt had calculated it would burn about 550 litres a day; when the grid operator informed the hospital that the outage might last until the end of the following week, Brandt was quickly dispatched to fetch more diesel from the nearest petrol station that was still on the grid."

"Meanwhile, he'd heard that a neighbouring hospice was going to move its patients to the hospital, too. What Brandt didn't know and what would have soured his mood even more was that his hospital was cut off because a couple of hours earlier, at about 6am, approximately 12km away, someone had set fire to five high-voltage cables fixed to the underside of a bridge over the Teltow canal, a long waterway that cuts through the southern part of the German capital."

"Virtually all of Berlin's 22,400 miles of electricity cables are buried underground, but there are vulnerable points, especially crossing water; these five cables, each 10cm thick, led f"

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