The plane crash storyline in Breaking Bad seems to be in part inspired by this event. Having lived in the are and going to school in Überlingen at the time it

The plane crash storyline in Breaking Bad seems to be in part inspired by this event. Having lived in the are and going to school in Überlingen at the time it is not something I'm ever going to forget. I did not notice the crash itself (I'm a deep sleeper) but heard about it in the radio at morning. First I thought I must have misheared. Being a vonlunteer firefighter in our village I wondered, why I did not get an alarm. On my way to the train station I stopped at our local fire station but saw only a small transporter was missing, so I figured they may have alarmed only a few people. There was some sort of "fog of war". Nobody knew anything for sure. There were rumours, that one of the planes crashed into the lake. The crash site being at Hohenbodman did not help because there is a village named Bodman on the other side of the lake. Waiting for the train and on the train there was nothing else we could talk about. Arriving in Überlingen, we (a classmate and I) went straight down to the lakeside of the city to see if we can catch a glimpse of anything. The atmosphere in the city was surreal. The route from the city center and train station to our school went over the yard of the city's fire station. And there it hit. Dozens of firefighters, police, red cross, etc. swarmed the place. A search dog unit just arrived. The facial expressions of everybody. At school there was no lessons of course. Everybody just talked about the crash and the newest rumours. Some classmates arrived by bus and their bus drove straight by the crashsite. They saw corpses under cloth and smoking debris. A few hours later people from the local newspaper arrived to distribute a special issue with the most comprehensive compilation of available information at the time. (... a few months later ...) We had local festivities and I helped. It was bigger festivities and we spent days building everything and had to gather stalls, building material and tools from various storage areas, companies, etc. To fetch something I went with someone to a local building company. We went into their warehouse and an overwhelming stench of kerosene hit me. The warehouse was filled with transport container trays full of excavated ground that was contaminated with kerosine (and small debris) from the crash. The guy I went with just mentioned this in a very non-chalant way.