April 26, 2024

Athens News

News in English from Greece

Hurricanes rage across Europe, children among its victims

Devastating downpours and hurricanes replaced a heat wave in southern and central Europe that lasted several weeks and caused an unprecedented drought.

According to air force, among the twelve victims of extreme weather are three children. Deaths, mostly related to falling trees, have been reported in Austria, Italy and Corsica.

On the French island, wind gusts reached 224 km / h, the hurricane destroyed tent camps, mobile homes, caravans, uprooted huge trees. A 46-year-old man died from the fall of one of them, and a woman did not survive after the roof of a beach house torn off by a hurricane crashed into her car. Two more died at sea, and 20 people were injured of varying severity.

Nearly 13,000 people were evacuated from the tent cities as a precaution, but the night passed relatively calmly. The storm and hurricane took everyone by surprise: there were no warnings from the authorities. Cedric Bell, a restaurant owner in Corsica, tells Reuters:

“We’ve never seen a hurricane as strong as this, you might think it’s a tropical storm.”

In Austria, in the southern region of Carinthia, two girls of eight and four years old died. Fallen trees were responsible for their deaths. The mayor of the region says that the area affected by the hurricane is like “a battlefield.”

From fallen trees, a woman and a man said goodbye to their lives in Italy, in the Tuscany region. The hurricane wind did not spare Venice either, destroying the brickwork of the bell tower of the cathedral and tearing off the umbrellas in the cafe on St. Mark’s Square. The seaside resorts in Tuscany and northern Liguria suffered greatly from bad weather, and in Piombino the Ferris wheel went out of control.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUBOblF2f6I

And in Spain, fires continue that even downpours cannot cope with. The country has already experienced 400 fires this year, devastating more than 280,000 hectares of land.



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