Storm kills 12 in Germany, causes one billion euros damage
Pastor Dale Morgan
Storm kills 12 in Germany, causes one billion euros damage*
BERLIN, Jan 19 (AFP) Jan 19, 2007
A storm that lashed northern Europe killed at least 12 people in
Germany, halted rail services and caused an estimated one billion euros
of damage, authorities said Friday.
The country was battered by winds of up to 200 kilometres (120 miles)
per hour which felled trees and ripped roofs off buildings.
Rail services were slowly returning to normal after the conditions
forced the Deutsche Bahn national railway company to suspend all
services Thursday for the first time in its history.
Berlin's new central station, the biggest in Europe, was closed when
high winds tore a steel girder from its high-tech facade.
The two-tonne girder fell 40 meters (130 feet) on to a stairway, police
said.
"No-one was hurt, thank God," said Volker Knauer, the Deutsche Bahn
spokesman for the station.
The station re-opened to passengers around 1200 GMT Friday, but train
services remained heavily disrupted.
Structural engineers were seeking to establish why the steel and glass
building, which only opened eight months ago and cost an estimated one
billion euros (1.29 billion dollars), failed to withstand the first
storm it has had to contend with.
Berlin authorities said the storm, named Kyrill by German
meteorologists, was the most powerful in the city for 30 years.
The German federation of insurers said it caused around one billion
euros of damage.
The death toll rose to 11 after a motorist was killed in the
northwestern state of North-Rhine Westphalia when he crashed into a tree
uprooted by the wind.
Another four people, including two firemen, died in the state when they
were hit by falling trees.
An 18-month-old baby died after being crushed by a door which was ripped
off its hinges by high winds in Munich, in the southern state of
Bavaria, while a 73-year-old man was killed in Augsburg after a barn
door fell on him.
In the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, a man died when he was trapped
under a collapsed wall in a restaurant. Three drivers were killed by
fallen trees in Baden-Wuerttemberg, in the central town of Hildesheim
and in Strausberg, near Berlin.
Germany's national carrier Lufthansa said it had been forced to cancel
331 flights around Europe on Thursday, affecting almost 19,000
passengers, and its schedule remained disrupted.
The country's busiest airport, Frankfurt, said it had grounded 207 of
its 1,300 daily flights Thursday.
The wind also ripped off part of the roof of an archive holding
documents about the Nazis' victims at a museum at the site of the
Sachsenhausen concentration camp outside Berlin.
"Luckily there was little damage to the collection," the spokesman for
the museum, Horst Seferens, said.
Germany was among the countries worst hit by the storm which killed at
least 50 people across Europe.