New storm on the way: “Ylenia” and “Zeynep” follows “Antonia”

Several deaths and immense damage are the balance of the past storm days. Peace should only return on Tuesday – before that, storm depression “Antonia” hit Germany. Falling trees can be especially dangerous.

The full extent of the damage caused by “Ylenia” and “Zeynep” has not yet been recorded, but new adversity is already threatening: Storm depression “Antonia” is said to bring strong to stormy gusts during the course of the day. The German Weather Service (DWD) announced that Monday night could be turbulent. Heavy gusts of wind or hurricane-force gusts are possible.

Trees are particularly dangerous, as DWD meteorologist Adrian Leyser explained. “The trees, which were already affected by the previous storms and are standing in partially heavily softened soil, can easily fall over.”

Big financial damage

At the start of the weekend, hurricane low “Zeynep” caused a storm surge in the north, rail traffic failures and accidents on the roads. The storm also caused deaths and damage in other European countries, some as early as Friday. A total of 13 people died in Europe, the AFP news agency reported. Hundreds of thousands of people in England, Poland and the Czech Republic were temporarily without electricity.

According to an initial estimate, “Zeynep” caused insured damage of over 900 million euros in Germany. The storm was the most intense since “Kyrill” in 2007, said management consultancy Meyerthole Siems Kohlruss (MSK), which specializes in actuarial mathematics.

The company had estimated the insured damage from the previous storm “Ylenia” at 500 million euros. The total amount of the damage is likely to be even greater, because only such damage is counted as insured damage for which an insurance company actually pays in the end.

Top value at 162 kilometers per hour

The storm had crossed Germany with wind speeds of locally more than 160 kilometers per hour. The highest value was measured on Saturday night at around 162 kilometers per hour at the North Sea lighthouse “Alte Weser”, as reported by the DWD. The hurricane reached speeds of around 143 km/h near Büsum on the Schleswig-Holstein North Sea coast. At the Nordholz airfield near Cuxhaven and at the Kiel lighthouse, around 140 km/h were recorded at the top. On the East Frisian island of Spiekeroog, the hurricane blew at around 135 kilometers per hour.

High speeds were also measured on the peaks of the low mountain ranges. According to the DWD, the 1141 meter high Brocken in the Harz Mountains reported around 146 km/h.

For the first time since 2013, Hamburg experienced a very severe storm surge with more than 3.5 meters above the mean high water level during the “Zeynep” passage. In Bremen, a 55-meter-tall construction crane fell into an office building that was still under construction, in Hamburg, parts of the facade of a four-storey residential building collapsed. In Bad Zwischenahn, a spruce tree around nine meters high fell on a clinic building, nobody was injured. The North Sea islands of Wangerooge and Langeoog lost significant parts of their bathing beach.

Train cancellations until Monday

The storm days also had immense consequences for travel. Deutsche Bahn (DB) had partially stopped train traffic on Friday, and the failures, which mainly affected the north, often continued over the weekend. “The forecast for Sunday and Monday remains difficult,” said DB spokesman Achim Stauss on Saturday evening.

There is damage to the railway infrastructure on more than 1000 kilometers of track. Clearing crews are on duty around the clock to remove fallen trees and repair overhead lines. Due to the storm damage, delays and train cancellations can be expected in northern Germany and North Rhine-Westphalia until at least Monday afternoon, DB said on its website. Furthermore, no long-distance trains run north of Dortmund and Berlin. A few ICE trains run between Berlin, Hanover and Cologne as well as Munich, Hanover, Bremen and Hamburg.