I didn’t pay much attention to the weather forecast this week until Wednesday, when Germany’s National Weather Service urged everyone to stay home on Thursday if at all possible.

Yesterday I was supposed to visit some members, using "German Rail" train service as my means of transportation. To be on the safe side, on Wednesday I called the people I was supposed to visit and postponed my trip one week. As it turned out, I would not have made it home last night, since all train service was stopped in the early evening hours – a first for Germany – and thousands of people wound up stranded. Even today rail service has been disrupted, and I am not sure I will be able to make my scheduled trip to Hamburg tomorrow, since the main line between Cologne and the Ruhr valley is still shut down. Kyrill swept across north central Europe yesterday with wind gusts up over 130 mph, killing 46 people in Europe (11 here in Germany). Storms like this are not unusual at this time of year when the weather is warmer than normal, as it has been for weeks.

The first estimates of damage for Germany are running at about one billion euros, with the total expected to be higher. Kyrill was one of the strongest storms to hit Germany in the last 20 years. It wasn’t the strongest, but it covered a much bigger area than other strong storms in recent years. In eastern Germany thousands of people are still without electrical power as Kyrill knocked over high voltage lines. The new main train station in Berlin was damaged when a steel girder was knocked from its moorings. The station was then closed, but by afternoon today it had reopened. We lost a tree in the yard behind our apartment building, but other than that we were fortunate. Having been through Katrina some 18 months ago, I paid more attention to this winter storm than previous ones.