According to a report by local authorities, the storm that swept across Germany on Friday left at least one dead, almost 60 injured and considerable damage, especially in the west of the country.
In Rhineland-Palatinate, a 38-year-old man died after suffering an electric shock and falling on his head when entering a basement flooded due to storms, the Koblenz police said.
North Rhine-Westphalia was particularly affected: a tornado passed over Paderborn and caused 43 injuries, including ten serious injuries, the police in the city of around 150,000 said on Saturday.
Thirty of them were treated in the hospital, one woman was “in mortal danger,” she said.
The police put the “damage” caused by the tornado at “several million” euros.
According to a fire department spokesman, this rare and locally limited phenomenon would also have affected Lippstadt, about thirty kilometers away, but without any injuries.
The bad weather, which came after several days of unusually high temperatures for the country’s time of year, caused extensive damage in this region of western Germany. The police reported countless uprooted trees, demolished roofs, devastated shops.
Rail and road traffic remained disrupted on Saturday morning.
In the south, in the Roth region, a wooden hut collapsed where hikers had taken refuge. 14 people were seriously injured, including a woman and a child, local Bavarian police said.
The German weather services lifted most of the severe weather warnings on Saturday, but warned of isolated severe thunderstorms in Bavaria and strong gusts in the east.
The intensity of the storm on Friday is related to the arrival of particularly hot air from Spain and France on the one hand and cold air from the north in Germany on the other, meteorologist Özden Terli explained on ZDF about an “explosive mixture”.