Wind

Two lives claimed in Belgium by the raging storm.

Raging storm? Only a few days ago while battling the Reykjavík wind I was thinking how I didn't remember it ever having been terribly windy in Belgium. Was it simply that my memory wasn't better, or was Belgium really not a windy place? Less windy than a flat, barren peninsula sticking out into the Atlantic Ocean, surely.

I guess I was wrong. On Thursday the wind was definitely a full match for a... well, a fairly windy day in Reykjavík. It wasn't until I ran into a tree that had snapped and lay on the road, and few minutes later one uprooted, leaning against a house, that I noticed that maybe this was more serious.

The next morning, as daylight shone on the backyard of the house, nay, mansion I'm staying at in Sint-Denijs-Westrem (it's a Bed and Breakfast just outside of Gent I'm temporarily living at), I saw that all of Madame Francine (the landlady)'s pine trees were either uprooted or broken in pieces, a large pile of branches in one corner of the backyard, next to the swimming pool (I mentioned it was a mansion, right?).

And then news of the casualties started coming in. Did I really misjudge the ferocity of the storm so much, or is this just an area not used to such storms as are so common in Reykjavík, making the effects more apparent? I don't know what the wind speeds were here, but certainly nothing close to what they had in Germany.

In any case, it didn't take long to clear the roads and get the traffic moving again, and in fact this evening when I went with 13 other (former) Nuance employees to the restaurant La Rustica for a pizza there was hardly any trace at all of the storm that had passed over just hours before.