Yesterday I wrote about the storm that hit the Netherlands that day. Today, AmericaBlog noticed reports:
It’s pretty calm now but lots of noise last night. Fortunately for those of us in Paris the winds were not that bad, especially compared to the Christmas storm a few years ago (1998?) when Versailles lost thousands of trees and we even had two trees in the yard snap. The storm yesterday was quite serious, not to mention highly unusual, for those in the UK, Netherlands and into Germany. Any signs of the winds where you are for the early morning crew?
To answer that question: yesterday truly was horrible. My parents were visiting my sister in the south of the country and could not return yesterday evening, so they returned today. Today is windy, but it’s nothing compared to yesterday. However, as I understand it, we’ll be hit by another storm tomorrow.
CNN: Storm kills 27 in northern Europe.
Hurricane-force winds and heavy downpours hammered northern Europe on Thursday, killing 27 people and disrupting travel for tens of thousands — including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, whose plane circled for 15 minutes before landing amid winds gusting to 77 mph.
The storms were among the fiercest in years, ripping off part of the roof at Lord’s Cricket Ground in London, toppling a crane in the Netherlands and upending trucks on Europe’s busiest highway.
By evening, weather-related accidents had killed 27 people, including a 2-year-old boy hit by falling brick from a toppled wall in London.
Rice cut short her visit to Berlin in order to leave for London before winds worsened, landing at Heathrow Airport in winds gusting up to 77 mph.
“It’s not often you get winds of that sort of strength that far inland,” said John Hammond of Britain’s weather office. “(Rice) did well to land there, I wouldn’t have fancied doing that.”
Also from CNN:
In Amsterdam, bicyclists who ventured out despite warnings from the fire department were blown over or, in some cases, blown backward.
Serious. Who in his right mind would go out to bicycle with windspeeds up to 130 km/h? That’s idiotic.
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