Gale-force winds try capital area over the weekend

Emergency service phone lines jammed by calls; bad weather puts a downward spin to summer’s first music festivals

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The rescue departments of Uusimaa Province responded to more than 500 calls made by the public over the weekend relating to damage caused by high winds. The worst hit were the cities of Helsinki and Espoo where a great number of trees were brought down by the strong gusts. No injuries were reported, however.
      “We completed 170 missions brought on by the windy conditions. This is an outrageously high figure. Normally we would get 15-20 such assignments”, says Fire Chief Markku Ahola from the Helsinki Rescue Department.
      The firefighters were alerted to locations in Espoo around a hundred times to clear the damage caused by the wind.
     
Most of the assignments were completed by late Saturday night. The Western Uusimaa Rescue Department, however, continued to clear the fallen trees in eleven separate locations well into Sunday.
      Fire Chief Ahola emphasises that in similar situations the residents would do well to assess first the urgency of the situation and the damage, before “rushing to dial 112” (the emergency number in use in Finland).
      Small and out-of-the-way incidents could be reported for example to the municipal public works departments, Ahola suggests.
     
The lousy weather also proved disastrous to the summer’s first rock festivals. On Sunday it looked like Järvenpää’s Pop Circus Festival and Espoo’s Kivenlahti Rock would fall well short of their attendance goals.
      “The weekend’s balance was as follows: Friday - hard rain, a tree fell down, a miniature twister or tromb hit the site at night. Saturday - very hard rain, very strong winds, and a power failure that affected half of the city of Järvenpää. For today hail, snow, and lightning has been predicted. In this situation nothing surprises me any more”, Pop Circus promoter Jokke Härmä cursed the weather on Sunday.
      In Kivenlahti the wind blew over tents and fences on Saturday.
      “One could say that things were verging on catastrophe”, promoter Jere Makkonen summarised.
     
On Saturday the wind, the speed of which reached 20 metres per second, uprooted trees in several locations around Finland.
      For example in Helsinki’s Käpylä district the tram traffic came to a halt after a tree fell on the track.
      Also the tarpaulins detached by the wind from scaffolding at various construction sites around the capital area added to the rescue workers’ already hectic schedules.
      In the Gulf of Finland, the Coast Guard ended up rescuing several boaters, whose vessels had become unmanageable because of engine failure. Certain marker buoys were also detached by the wind, while some boats moored ashore suffered damage.
      “Furthermore, trees fell on cars and on a couple of houses”, said an exhausted Fire Chief Mikael Siitonen of the Helsinki Rescue Department when interviewed on Saturday night.
     
The storm has now blown itself out, but the week will kick off with more unsettled weather as Finns, anxious to get on with their summer holidays, look back wistfully to the balmy conditions we enjoyed towards the end of May.
      Could it be, some ask, that THAT was our summer this time around?


Links:
  The Finnish Meteorological Institute

Helsingin Sanomat