When the lightning lit up the sky last night, and the wind was howling over the rooftops, we were pretty clear it was a storm. But an Orkan? C’mon. Apparently so. Winds of up to 110 kmph (roughly 65 mph) in Berlin alone, worse elsewhere, 34 people dead, according to the Berliner Morgenpost. A two-ton steel girder got ripped off the front of the new glass-and-steel train station in Berlin, and they evacuated it. No estimate on when it’ll be open to traffic again. Condy had to leave Berlin early to get to London ahead of the storm, the poor thing.
The storm was named “Kyrill,” due to Germany’s system of allowing people to buy names for storms. Three kids bought this one for their Dad’s birthday, $385, before realizing it was a killer. Thanks, kids.
One response to “Northern European hurricane”
[…] Thunder outside, raindrops that leave an inch-wide mark on my T-shirt as I ride in out of its fringes, hail bouncing off the window, cars already leaving wakes like speedboats on Bornholmer Str. outside. But it’s nothing compared to yesterday, when the sky turned an ugly orange-red in the west, and then black, and then out of nowhere wind stronger than I’ve felt anytime in the last year here, the storm that blew apart the Hauptbahnhof included. You could see the rain coming in sideways before it hit, a weird curtain just a hundred yards away that didn’t seem to be dropping like ordinary precipitation. And then the hammer (Tornado! calls Bowlserised), lights in the sky, you can see why Thor was such a thing. Or Odin. Anyone with lightning. […]