A fire alarm forced Westfield Hamburg Überseequartier to evacuate for the second time since its debut a week and a half ago. Thousands of people were forced to evacuate the retail mall on Saturday.

Another alert at the Westfield Centre: A police official verified that the new retail mall on Überseeboulevard was totally evacuated at 1:08 p.m. According to the fire department, no one was in danger or wounded. The procedure was completed in half an hour. It was another false alarm.

This is already the second evacuation within ten days. Just on April 10, all shoppers had to be evacuated from the shopping mall due to a false alarm. A moviegoer told MOPO that there was also a false alarm on Good Friday: “We were sitting in the cinema when suddenly the lights came on and an automatic announcement came on,” said the Westfield visitor. “They were saying there was a malfunction.” Because of the rain, the mall visitors waited under the roof of the shopping mall until employees sent them outside.

A fire department spokesperson would neither confirm nor deny the evacuation on Good Friday, but emphasized that false alarms were “quite normal” at the beginning: “A new system like this needs to get used to its new state. That will certainly happen a few more times in the near future.”

Last weekend, the traffic situation on Überseeboulevard caused chaos. The trams ran too infrequently, the streets were overcrowded and some even had to be closed off, and the parking garage was completely overcrowded.