Berlin - A storm that drenched parts of south-western Germany and brought hailstones as big as tennis balls killed a man and injured more than 100 people, police said on Thursday.
Less than 24 hours later, a similar hailstorm hit the same area of the Black Forest, knocking a man off a roof as he was repairing damage from the Wednesday evening storm, police said. He was in critical condition. The downpour again flooded building basements.
But police said the hailstones had not been as big as those that injured people, hammered cars and smashed windows the previous day.
In the Black Forest town of Villingen-Schwenningen, population 82 000, a teacher, Rolf-Juergen Look, stared sadly at his car, which had dozens of dents from the first hailstorm.
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"It happened in just a few minutes," he said. Holes were punched in the roof of his home too, and months of gardening were wasted, with all the young plants flattened. Area firefighters took 700 calls to pump water out of basements, patch roofs and clear roads of debris.
"We only bought our BMW three days ago and now it's a total write-off," said another resident, Ingrid Huber, 50. "And on top of that, I got hit on the head by the hail."
The town hospital said it treated 120 people, mostly for bruises and cuts from lumps of ice.
A 66-year-old farmer who tried to herd his cattle into a shed in the nearby area of Haslach drowned when a peaceful stream became a torrent, sweeping away a trailer that hit him and held him under water.
The summer storms, attributed by meteorologists to sharp changes of temperature, caused millions of euros in damage.
The extremes were marked by a temperature reading of minus one degree Celsius at dawn on Friday at a weather observatory on Germany's North Sea coast and reports of °40C in the shade, just 1 200km away in Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina, this week.
Spots baked by the sun had reached temperatures of °60C in Bosnia this week, according to the Sarajevo weather office, which said the previous seven days had been the hottest for a century. - Sapa-dpa
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