White Pentecost: Heavy hailstorms have covered fields and towns in the Allgäu. Snow shovels and even a wheel loader were used for clearing. Storms also caused problems elsewhere.
Over the Pentecost weekend in particular, storms repeatedly swept across southern Germany. There was a special picture in the Allgäu: In the district of Lindau, the hail was so thick in places that it resembled a snowy winter landscape.
Residents shoved the icy snow aside with snow shovels, even a wheel loader was in use and piled the hail meters high.
In many places, the storm caused damage such as falling roof tiles, lightning strikes or flooded basements. In Biessenhofen, a car got stuck in a full underpass. The occupants were freed unharmed. In Immenstadt, the gondolas of the Mittagbahn stopped due to the storm, four people were freed from them. In Memmingen, the “Ikarus” music festival was briefly interrupted in the afternoon, and the guests were asked not to go to their tents but to their cars. Trees crashed into cars several times in Bavaria, nobody was injured.
France and Turkey also affected
In Aschbach in Rhineland-Palatinate, a storm on Pentecost Sunday damaged the roofs of around 20 houses, and no one was injured here either. In Hesse, storms caused numerous operations, especially in Darmstadt and the Darmstadt-Dieburg district. A lightning strike caused several pumps at a sewage pumping station to fail, according to the Darmstadt fire brigade. The water masses could not be drained into the sewage system, various cellars and apartments were filled up to knee height.
Storms also raged in other European countries at the weekend. A 53-year-old woman who was locked in her basement apartment drowned in Burdur, southwestern Turkey. Turkish media showed pictures of streets covered with brown mud. In France, a woman died after being swept away by a mudslide in Rouen. Hailstones – some larger than golf balls – caused considerable damage in the Landes and Gers departments in the south-west of the country, including on thousands of hectares of vineyards. Around 15,000 households were temporarily cut off from the power supply.
The situation in Austria and Switzerland
For the Alpine region, Switzerland and Austria reported hundreds of operations due to flooding and storm damage on Monday night. In Upper Austria, up to 30,000 households were now without electricity. In the Salzburg region, several trees fell on the Tauernautobahn.
In the new week, low-pressure areas determined the weather, the German Weather Service said on Monday. It will be unstable, but there is no longer any risk of storms.
