Thunderstorms and heavy rain kept people in suspense during the night, especially in southern Germany. Emergency services drove hundreds of operations. Meteorologists are now warning of renewed storms during the day. The weather is expected to calm down again on Sunday.
Storms are threatening in the east and south of Germany during the course of the day. According to the meteorologists from wetter.de, further showers and thunderstorms with heavy rain and hail are possible with changing to heavy clouds. In the later course of the day it loosens up, especially in the north-west and west. According to the experts, it will remain mostly dry there anyway. The temperatures are between 19 degrees on the North Sea and up to 26 degrees on the Upper Rhine.
In the night to Sunday there are more heavy showers and thunderstorms in the south and east, especially in the first half of the night, with a risk of local flooding, according to wetter.de. During the night, the strongest thunderstorm cells are expected to retreat to the southeast, Erzgebirge and Oder. In the rest of Germany, the night is quieter, mostly dry with lows between 18 and 12 degrees.
The risk of severe weather from heavy rain, hail and gusts of wind is triggered by the "Ornella" low and the muggy, warm air. According to the meteorologists, the weather will calm down again on Sunday thanks to the increasing influence of high pressure from the west. In the new week, this high-pressure influence initially largely determines the weather. Only the north is occasionally touched by weak frontal extensions.
Thunderstorms and heavy rain had already hit the south of Germany during the night and kept the fire brigade and police forces in suspense. According to the authorities, a major fire after a lightning strike caused damage in the millions in a workshop complex in Weingarten near Karlsruhe in Baden-Württemberg. In many places there were floods and traffic obstructions with hundreds of operations.
A former timber company was affected by the lightning strike in Weingarten at night, which housed several car workshops and warehouses, according to the police and fire brigade in Karlsruhe. As a result, no one was harmed. The police estimated that the property damage should be in the millions.
First, a warehouse caught fire. A little later, the fire spread to a paint shop, where gas bottles exploded. Several neighboring houses were evacuated. The extinguishing work continued throughout Saturday. The police reported problems with owners of mobile homes or caravans who wanted to take their vehicles to safety and thus disrupted the operation.
According to the fire brigade, the roof structure of a residential building in Stutensee near Karlsruhe was on fire after a lightning strike. This fire was quickly extinguished. Nobody got hurt. The Karlsruhe emergency services reported many other operations in connection with thunderstorms and heavy rain, for example because of fallen trees or flooded basements.
Overall, the storms hit southern Germany in particular. The police in Constance reported flooded streets, flushed manhole covers and water ingress in residential buildings. Near Pforzheim, an exit from Autobahn 8 was flooded with mud, so it had to be closed. A mile-long traffic jam formed.
The fire brigade in Walldorf south of Heidelberg was on duty at a supermarket whose roof threatened to collapse. The market was evacuated and no one was injured. In Bavaria, too, thunderstorms and heavy rain caused the emergency services to struggle for hours in many places.
In Kaiserslautern, Rhineland-Palatinate, the police collected dozens of license plates that had been lost when driving through deep puddles and were waiting for their owners. Various number plates also accumulated with the officials in Salzgitter, Lower Saxony.
In Berlin, a planned concert by the band Die Ärzte on Tempelhofer Feld was canceled on Friday evening. The public festival hosted by Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier in Bellevue Palace was canceled and continued as planned on Saturday. More storms were expected for parts of Germany over the weekend.
