The damage caused by the storm "Ylenia" was initially limited until Thursday afternoon.

Trees fell on houses and damaged them.

Roofs were also damaged by the wind and some were covered.

There is one fatality in the Lower Saxony district of Uelzen, where a man in his car was killed by a falling oak tree near Bad Bevensen.

Reinhard Bingener

Political correspondent for Lower Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Bremen based in Hanover.

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In northern and western Germany, roads were also blocked by fallen trees, which had to be cleared by firefighters.

On the A 29 near Oldenburg, a truck was hit by a gust on the Hunte Bridge and overturned;

the bridge was closed in the direction of Wilhelmshaven.

There were also some cancellations in air traffic.

There were severe restrictions on rail traffic in large parts of northern Germany.

After many private railway operators had already stopped their journeys on Wednesday evening, Deutsche Bahn also stopped long-distance traffic in the north until noon on Thursday morning and also struggled with severe disabilities in regional traffic.

In many places, the overhead lines were damaged by fallen trees.

The restrictions on rail traffic are likely to last until Saturday;

Deutsche Bahn offers later use and free cancellations for tickets already purchased.

On a stormy trip across the Elbe, a large wave smashed the windscreen of a Hamburg harbor ferry.

Apparently nobody on board was seriously injured, said the managing director of the operating company Hadag, Tobias Haack.

According to dpa information, however, there was a slightly injured passenger.

All passengers disembarked on foot at the pier, Haack said.

Hadag is trying to contact them.

"It was an incident that we've never had before." The panes were supposed to be "seaproof".

Schools were also closed in many places because of Ylenia.

The North Rhine-Westphalian state government canceled classes throughout the state on Thursday, and in Lower Saxony many districts also decided to keep schools closed.

Many other facilities also remained closed.

Inland, the storm low Ylenia reached very high wind speeds in the northern low mountain ranges, according to the German Weather Service, 156 kilometers per hour were measured shortly after midnight on the Brocken in the Harz Mountains.

Several roads in the Harz had to be closed.

The extent of the damage in the forests was initially not foreseeable on Thursday morning.

Damage in the forests is not yet foreseeable

Michael Rudolph from the Lower Saxony state forests in the Harz region told the FAZ that the foresters also had clear instructions not to enter the forests because of the danger.

It is not yet possible to predict whether there will be similar damage to the forests as in the devastating hurricane Kyrill in 2007.

The decisive factor for this is less the duration of the storm, but above all the sequence of the gusts.

"The problem is when the tree hasn't straightened up properly and then the next gust follows," explained Rudolph.

The wet soil can also have an unfavorable effect on the stability of the trees.

In addition, the trees are still weakened by the hot summer and the bark beetle plague of recent years.

In the Harz Mountains, one has to deal with thinned out and disheveled forests in which the individual trees are no longer protected from the wind by the tree population.

The current storms shouldn't weigh much against this massive damage, Rudolph said.

The foresters in the Harz now see the events as "fatalistic".

After the storm initially lost strength on Thursday morning, wind speeds were expected to increase again on Thursday afternoon.

From Friday noon onwards, the low "Ylenia" will be followed immediately by the next storm with "Zeynep", which will again mainly hit northern Germany and will possibly be even stronger than "Ylenia".

However, the exact course of the so-called high-speed runner is difficult for meteorologists to predict.