Rare tornado tears up city, kills woman
AMSTERDAM: A tornado ripped through a southwestern Dutch city on Monday, killing a woman and injuring nine others in the first fatal twister to hit the country for three decades.
The whirlwind left a trail of destruction through the seaside city of Zierikzee, ripping the roofs off homes and toppling trees onto cars.
Images on social media showed debris rotating in the air in the fierce winds and a huge funnel descending from stormy clouds as the tornado hit the city in the scenic province of Zeeland.
The victim was a 73-year-old woman from Wassenaar, a town near The Hague, police said. Local media said she was a tourist who was hit on the head by a roof tile in the city’s harbour area.
One injured person was taken to hospital and eight others were treated on site by paramedics it said, adding that there had been a “huge deployment” of emergency services.
“It got completely dark. Outside you could see everything flying, everything in the air,” Zierikzee resident Freek Kouwenberg, 72, said.
“I’ve never experienced anything like it.”
The tornado hit at the start of the tourism season in Zierikzee, which sits on one of the bridge-connected islands that comprise Zeeland province, whose attractions include a historic fishing harbour and the 15th century “Fat Tower”.
Its path could be traced through one neighbourhood, where the twister tore a huge piece of black roofing off the top of a block of four terraced houses and dumped it in a residential street.
A mechanical digger was lifting debris from the road near to where a car lay partly crushed by a tree. Firefighters had sealed off the road with tape while they carried out searches.
Workmen had been carrying out repairs on the roof just before the tornado hit, and fled for their lives, said local resident Ben Dubbeld, 58.
“It was getting closer and closer, so they ran, really ran. I’ve never seen people run so fast,” Mr Dubbeld said.
“They hadn’t been downstairs for five seconds and then the whole roof came flying off and all hell broke loose,” he said.