One dead and nine injured in Dutch tornado

It is a particularly rare natural disaster in the Netherlands.

A tornado killed at least one person, injured nine and caused extensive property damage Monday in Zierikzee, a coastal town in the southwest of the country, where it is the first natural phenomenon of its type to have been deadly in three decades.

The whirlwind, which occurred at the start of the tourist season in this seaside town, left a trail of destruction in its wake, blowing off rooftops and toppling trees onto cars.

A huge piece of black roofing was torn from the top of a block of four terraced houses and thrown into a nearby street.

Like a “war zone”

“The damage is considerable in several streets”, for their part announced the authorities of the province of Zeeland.

“Unfortunately, there was one death in the tornado,” they added, noting that one injured person was taken to hospital and eight others were treated at the scene by paramedics.

The person killed was a tourist hit in the head by a tile in the port area of ​​the city, said the local newspaper

, which the desolate landscape makes think of a "war zone".

In particular, tiles were torn by the wind from the roof of a church, trampolines flew away and the facade of a house collapsed, reported public television NOS.

Full version of the #tornado in #zierikzee pic.twitter.com/qXuWuOvzXW

— J Steenbakker (@steenbakker_j) June 27, 2022

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Images on social media show debris being swept away by a column of swirling air and a large white funnel of clouds against a dark sky.

“Everything went completely black.

Outside, you could see everything flying, everything in the air,” said Freek Kouwenberg, a 72-year-old resident of Zierikzee, saying he had “never experienced anything like it”.

A flat country very vulnerable to extreme weather events

No less than 20 homes have been made temporarily uninhabitable and the authorities have installed a shelter for the victims, according to a local association.

One of the people injured was a worker who was renovating one of these dwellings.

The emergency services called on the population not to approach the area so as not to complicate the work of the police and firefighters and because of the tiles and branches which could fall.

Zierikzee is on one of the islands connected by a bridge that make up the province of Zeeland.

The Netherlands, whose flat territory is just above sea level, which makes it very vulnerable to extreme climatic events, experiences several tornadoes each year, but the previous one to have caused deaths there dates back to 1992, according to the Dutch meteorological agency KNMI, the others date from 1967, 1972 and 1981. “Violent whirlwinds, also called tornadoes, are rare in our country”, noted KNMI.

World

Germany: A tornado injures 30, including 10 seriously in the west of the country

In the United States, a tornado kills at least six

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