Arson attacks:

Are eco-toilet haters up to mischief in Vienna?

This is what a mobile toilet should look like (symbolic image on the left), but this is what the torched toilet building on Sachsenplatz looks like.(Bild: Krone KREATIV/Öklo zVg)

Six times in just one night, Vienna's professional fire department had to be called out to six locations to extinguish toilet blocks that were on fire. Nothing is left of the mobile toilet facilities. Nobody really wants to believe it was a coincidence. Because the ecological toilets only burn with fire accelerants. 

Composting toilets - clean, nose-friendly, ecological. This is the name given to the "Öklo" toilet facilities, which are becoming increasingly popular not only in Vienna. Many municipalities - now in half of Austria - use the environmentally friendly toilet variant. There are also more and more eco toilets on building sites, at events and at campsites.

Whether they actually smell less than their competitors remains to be seen. In any case, the toilets are unlikely to be popular everywhere, as the "Krone" newspaper has now discovered.

This is what an "Öklo" toilet facility looks like in its original state.(Bild: Öklo)

Six out of 150 Viennese facilities burned down
While the founders of "Öklo" are currently happy about the installation of new toilets in Upper Austria and Salzburg, the night of last Sunday will probably remain a bad memory for a long time to come.

What happened that night in Vienna has not only been on the minds of company bosses ever since. The professional fire department was also deployed at six of the 150 fixed locations of the toilet blocks - and since then the police have also been investigating. 

Nothing is left of the toilet facility in Allerheiligenpark apart from coal.(Bild: Reinhard Holl)

Fire department had to put out six fires
But what exactly happened? During the night of June 30, between two and four o'clock in the morning to be precise, six of the toilet facilities installed in Vienna went up in flames in Allerheiligenpark, Mortarapark, Sachsenplatz, Brigittenauer Bad, Freie Mitte and Wienerberg. The fire department confirmed the incidents.

They had arrived with so-called rapid intervention equipment. The fires were quickly extinguished using the extinguishing lines, which were laid directly from the vehicle. 

We hope this was a one-off operation. At the moment, nobody can explain who is behind the fires.

„Öklo“-Mitgründer Philipp Wildberger

Fire accelerant was involved
All that remained of the wooden toilet blocks was a thin metal skeleton - the rest was consumed by the flames. And that's where the speculation begins. Because, as "Öklo" co-founder Philipp Wildberger explained to "Krone", the houses are designed in such a way that they only start to burn when the heat reaches 450 to 500 degrees.

As normal wood goes up in flames at 300 degrees, the attacks are hardly the work of pranksters. It is very likely that fire accelerants were used.

At Mortaraplatz, too, only a black metal column remains in the air.(Bild: Reinhard Holl)

Tens of thousands of euros worth of damage
However, whoever wanted to sabotage the composting toilets is now the subject of an investigation. As yet, "nobody can explain" the attacks, says Wildberger. The only hope now is that the fateful night was an isolated incident. And that nobody specifically targeted the popular wooden toilets.

However, the damage is enormous. Together, the six ecological toilets were probably worth around 35,000 euros.