Gale-force winds dumping heavy snow caused havoc across Austria on Saturday, blowing cars across roads and into deadly collisions, knocking out power to thousands of homes and tearing a balcony off a building that critically injured a man below.
Several hundred cars spun out of control and ended up in snow banks along the north-south A2 highway, where visibility was poor as gusts exceeding 100kph blew snow into the air.
Authorities closed the A2 near the city of Graz for more than three hours after 30cm of wind-whipped snow fell on the area.
”It was a very serious situation. Even the firefighters had trouble driving through that weather,” said fire department spokesperson Robert Karger.
In neighbouring Slovakia, the winds were clocked at 173kph, the most powerful recorded wind speed since 1936, authorities said. Bad weather in Slovakia’s Tatras mountains was blamed for the death of a 27-year-old Czech who disappeared while hiking.
Fierce winds inflicted significant damage in Slovakia, tearing tiles from the roofs of dozens of homes and toppling trees that smashed into power lines, buildings and automobiles, the official TASR news agency reported.
Zsolt Simon, Slovakia’s Agriculture Minister, said the winds destroyed vast swaths of forest equivalent to 90% of the amount of timber harvested annually nationwide.
In Austria, the storm had at least one silver lining: fresh snow in the alpine province of Tyrol helped police track down and arrest a 43-year-old suspected art thief from Germany. Gendarmes followed the man’s footprints after he fled on foot from a mountain hotel from which he allegedly stole two oil paintings, police said.
But the storm was disastrous on roads. Police reported numerous head-on collisions apparently caused when powerful gusts pushed cars over the centre line and into oncoming traffic.
In one accident, two minivans collided, killing a 32-year-old man and injuring two young children, Austrian television said.
In the eastern province of Burgenland, a flower vendor’s van tumbled over an embankment, killing one of the passengers, an Egyptian national, and seriously injuring the two other occupants.
A wind gust tore a balcony off the third floor of a house in Graz, striking a 31-year-old workman from Bosnia and critically injuring him, Austrian radio said. The victim was hospitalised with serious head injuries.
Heavy winds were blamed for damage to homes, businesses and property across Austria, where thousands of households were without electricity overnight. Power was restored to most areas by mid-afternoon on Saturday, officials said.
Wind ripped a large advertising billboard from its aluminium frame and sent it crashing down onto a street near the United Nations complex in Vienna, police said. No one was injured.
Firefighters in the south-western province of Carinthia worked overnight to clear streets of debris and remove fallen trees from rooftops and overhead power lines.
In Klagenfurt, the provincial capital, strong winds uprooted a tree that struck a utility worker as he was removing another fallen tree from a power cable, knocking him 10m to the ground. He suffered serious injuries and was taken by helicopter to a hospital.
At the St Gilgen ski resort in Salzburg province, heavy winds prompted officials to cancel the gondola service shuttling skiers and snowboarders to the summit. Local authorities also cancelled a mountain rescue exercise, saying it was too windy to conduct the training. — Sapa-AP