#Rare #tornado #kills #Netherlands
A tornado swept through a city in the Netherlands on Monday, killing at least one person and injuring ten others in the first deadly tornado to hit the country in three decades.
The hurricane left a trail of devastation through the southwestern coastal town of Zierikzee, blowing off the roofs of four houses and hurling debris into the air.
“There was one fatality in the tornado. In addition, the first picture shows about 10 other injured. The emergency services are still busy mapping the overall size,” the Zeeland provincial safety authority said in a statement.
“The damage is considerable in several streets in Zierikzee. In addition to flying roof tiles and fallen trees, the roofs of four houses were blown off.”
Images on social media showed debris being thrown high into the air by a rotating wind column.
Others showed large white cloud funnels stretching out from the base of a dark sky as people stopped their cars or left their restaurant tables to watch.
“The hurricane kept getting bigger. It reminded me of American movies with these storm chasers,” resident Maurice van den Nouweland was quoted as saying by Dutch national news agency ANP.
“It felt like the room was being vacuumed,” added another resident, Douwe Ouwerkerk, who was at home when the tornado struck.
He said he saw “roof tiles, a garden pool, what appeared to be a tent” lifted off the ground.
– ‘Rare in our country’ –
Tiles were ripped from the roof of a church and trampolines were thrown through the air, Dutch public broadcaster NOS said.
The front of a house had collapsed completely, it said.
As many as 20 rental homes were temporarily made uninhabitable by the hurricane and officials organized shelters for residents, the local housing association said.
One of the injured was a worker who was renovating one of the properties, it said.
The emergency services asked people to stay away from the area so as not to hinder the work of the police and fire brigade and because of the danger from falling tiles and branches.
The Netherlands experiences several tornadoes each year, but the last deadly one to hit the country was in 1992, the Dutch weather agency KNMI said.
The previously recorded deadly tornadoes in the Netherlands were in 1967, 1972 and 1981.
“Severe cyclones, also known as tornadoes, are rare in our country,” the KNMI said on its website after Monday’s twister.
“The area in which they occur is usually no larger than a narrow track two to tens of kilometers long and a few hundred meters wide.”
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