A least one person was confirmed dead and two others were injured as violent winds uprooted trees and caused travel chaos in Germany on Sunday evening.
Africa Daily News, New York gathered that a 58-year-old man was killed in the town of Beelitz near the capital Berlin on Saturday evening when an election poster fell on him as he walked with his partner, local media reported citing the police.
A falling tree injured a pedestrian in the northern city of Bremen, while in the northeastern Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania region a motorcyclist was seriously injured after colliding with an uprooted tree.
Fallen branches and trees disrupted long-distance train services on Saturday evening and Sunday in northern and eastern Germany, particularly between Berlin, Bremen and Hamburg.
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Berlin’s firefighters requested residents to stay at home as strong winds lashed the city from Saturday evening.
The port city of Hamburg’s famous fish market was flooded and debris damaged several road vehicles.
Weather services on Sunday warned that high-speed winds were expected to spread to southern Germany.
Meanwhile, Germany has announced that was it has pulled the plug on half of the six nuclear plants it still has in operation, just about a year before the country draws the final curtain on its decades-long use of atomic power.
It would be recalled that the decision to completely phase out nuclear power and shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy was first taken by the centre-left government of Gerhard Schroeder in 2002.
Angela Merkel who succeeded him, reversed her decision to extend the lifetime of Germany’s nuclear plants in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan and set 2022 as the final deadline for shutting them down.
The three reactors now being shuttered were first powered up in the mid-1980s. Together they provided electricity to millions of German households for almost four decades.
AFRICA DAILY NEWS, NEW YORK