The Elements at war

It has been oppressively hot in Germany over the past week or so.  

Hot and extremely humid.

We seemed to go from cool weather in which we wondered whether the summer would ever arrive, to having it suddenly switched on and put on 'extra high'.  The high level of pollution in the skies over  the wide shallow valley in which Dusseldorf sits, combine to keep the heat in one place for long periods of time.

Combine this with hundreds of children under the age of twelve who spend lunchtime running around on the playground, and then come, sweaty and smelly, to the Library for book choice time and I think you get this picture.  With no air conditioning the classrooms and the library gradually warm up and by the time we are ready to go home we are well nigh wilting!

And then on top of all that we have had 'The Storm'.

* * * * * *

Monday was a public holiday (Pentecost Monday) and had proven to be rather a pleasant, albeit warm, day:

In the evening we had dinner on our balcony:

We admired the first of our Asiatic lilies to flower:

An hour later and we were running about battening down the hatches!

http://liveblog.t-online.de/Event/Schwere_Unwetter_wuten_uber_Deutschland_2

The storm came rolling across the sky before we were ready for it.  The clouds were suddenly yellowish and extremely angry looking.  

Full bellied with mischief.

The birds had all gone quiet.  The wind picked up and reading the signs, we and our neighbors began to take down the pot plants, lay the tables and chairs on the balcony floor, and take inside everything that might be considered fragile.  

Then the storm hit.

The sky was suddenly as black as night and the sound of thunder was everywhere. 

(I recall that my great-grandmother had a habit of waking up the entire household if a storm occurred at night.  She would everyone get up and go down to the cellars, no matter how fast asleep they might have been.)

As the storm vented its full fury upon us, I stood at the doorway and try to make some videos with my iPad, but it was too dark and too violent and so we abandoned the idea and retreating inside, closed the doors, the windows, and pulled down the external blinds.  

There was one truly enormous crack of thunder right above the apartment that frightened the living day lights out of us but then, after a while it all seemed to die down and we went to sleep.  At 5:30 in the morning it started up again, even more violently than previous.  I slept like a babe thoughout this second round but AGA was awakened and stayed awake for quite a while.    A parent I was talking to later at school told me that at the height of the storm she witnessed a fire ball!

In the morning all was calm once again.  Birds were singing and all was peaceful.  I looked out of the sitting room windows but could see no damage, and as we began our walk to school I said to AGA that it appeared to have been a lot of bluster but not much else.

But as we walked through the village we realized that it had been a lot more than mere bluster...

Here is the Linden Avenue that leads out of Kaiserswerth, last weekend:

And here it is yesterday, after the storm:


I do not know why some trees were spared while others fell.

Our end of the village was blocked by falling trees

...while the other end was flooded because the drains had backed up under the huge volume of water.  The roads were bumper to bumper with traffic as cars navigated fallen trees on the main roads in order to get to work.
For our part, we walk to school and so we had to navigate our way around (or over) various fallen trees on the way…

The massive trunks had to be climbed over and I soon realised that I am not as nimble as I was when in my twenties…

We passed parents walking their children in the opposite direction, to get to the local village kindergarten:

No cars could get through.

No one was going to be able to move their cars until the trees were cleared.  I think that a lot of branches came down because they were laden with flowers.

Imagine the force that broke and twisted this tree:

The branch of this tree (together with the top part) was snapped off and blown into the nearby allotments.  It crushed the little allotment houses and took a day to saw up and clear away.

These few photographs show the damage in our small village.  It was duplicated all over the city and the general area on a much grander scale.  On the weekend I am going to walk by the river to see what has happened as I am  told that most of the trees lining the Rhine have been blown down. 

Trees had fallen on the tram lines, upon countless cars, on houses.  Lightning strikes caused fires despite the driving rain.  Sadly six people were killed - cyclists and gardeners caught unaware - but considering how swiftly the storm blew up, and its ferocity, it is surprising there were not more.

We are going to have a lot of disruptions as gangs slowly clear the debris.  

On a lighter note, a student told AGA that their trampoline was blown clear away and they have no idea where it went.  I was telling a colleague who told me that she counted four floating in the Rhine - carried there by the force of the storm.  Others were blown in to fields. Our lily lost one petal and  another one bravely opened, as if to defy the elements!

There were many other areas in Germany that were hit harder than we were and the storm seemed to make the heat and humidity even worse.  As I write this we are experiencing a little relief although it is still 22c at 8:12 in the evening.

. . . and because we live in the 21st Century where iPods and iPads and mobile phones are our means of instant communication, everyone - young and old - have been out and about taking photos and movies and whatnot.  And so I joined them to provide you with a small window on what we have experienced here in the last forty-eight hours.  

If you are interested you can read more about the storm here.