Severe storms over the Alps have led to flooding and storm damage in the region. The bad weather front moved from west to east across Switzerland and Austria until Monday night. In the Salzburg region, several trees fell on the Tauernautobahn, as reported by the Austrian broadcaster ORF online.
The clearance work was made more difficult by heavy travel. In addition, two tunnels on this route had to be closed due to power failures. Fire brigades reported hundreds of operations. The winds blew off roofs and flooded streets and basements. In Upper Austria, up to 30,000 households were now without electricity.
No injuries were initially reported from Austria – on the other hand, three cases from Switzerland in the canton of Valais due to storms. Two people were hit by a flying tent, the canton police reported. With wind speeds of up to 132 kilometers per hour, hailstorms and heavy rain, buildings were also damaged in Switzerland.
On the Pentecost weekend, storms repeatedly swept across southern Germany in particular. 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 guests were asked not to go to their tents but to their cars. Trees crashed into cars several times in Bavaria, nobody was injured.
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.
