Sunday's storm ultimately caused little damage in Helsinki

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Sunday night's thunderstorm and torrential rain caused mainly momentary flooding in places in the Helsinki area with no serious implications.
      "We received no phone calls about flooded basements and such on Monday morning", explains fire-chief-on-duty Jari Lempinen from the City of Helsinki Rescue Department.
      Damage to the coastal train line (between Helsinki and Turku) caused by lightning was fixed before noon. However, the problems reappeared at around 6 o'clock in the evening.
      The thunder had damaged the signalling system's safety features on the stretch of track between Kirkkonummi and Karjaa. This caused the evening trains to run 15 to 30 minutes behind schedule.
     
Even though the Sunday night rain brought a substantial amount of water, emergency personnel received only four pumping assignments that night. Automated alarm systems that went haywire because of the thunder were a bigger problem. Thirteen false alarms were received.
      Some streets were also briefly flooded. The two men working at the Street Service Unit of the Helsinki Public Works Department had their hands full. They received 30 phone calls in the space of three hours early on Sunday evening as the cloudburst opened up.
      Leaves from trees blocked some of the rainwater ducts and the rescue workers had to remove them by hand. On Mannerheimintie, one of downtown Helsinki's main arteries, a suction truck had to be used to remove some of the water before the rescue staff could get to the blocked rainwater grille.
      On Koskelantie the rescue workers pushed two cars out of a pool of rainwater.
      The rain also damaged some sloping gravel roads, creating deep grooves in the middle of the road surface. "The same thing happens every summer when it rains hard", a local explained. "The rainwater drain at the top of the hill gets blocked and the water runs rampant down the street."
      "In places the rain displaced some earth, but all in all this was not a major catastrophe", Mikko Yletyinen from the Public Works Department describes.
     
The total rainfall recorded in the Helsinki region between Sunday morning and Monday morning was 20 millimetres. Monday noon was somewhat foggy. "The common denominator for the thunder and the fog is the warm and moist air", explains chief meteorologist Sari Hartonen from the Finnish Meteorological Institute.
      Finland has experienced thunderstorms after the month of September also last year and the year before. This time a thousand lightning strikes were registered in the sea areas, and between 400 and 500 inland. In the Baltic States up to 10,000 lightning strikes were recorded.


Links:
  Finnish Meteorological Institute
  Finnish Lightning Center - a StormTracker lightning radar located in Espoo (an interesting site, in Finnish)

Helsingin Sanomat