The bells of the Aalsmeer Village Church are ringing and chiming again. Exactly a year ago, a lightning strike shut down the installation and another failure followed at the end of last year. Local residents are breathing a sigh of relief now that the clocks are working again. They really missed the sound.
The lightning strike of January 19, 2023 caused significant damage to the electrical installation, causing the historic bells to stop. When the municipality of Aalsmeer had the damage repaired, things quickly went wrong again: a broken cable was the culprit at the end of December.
“Liander made it last week, so now we hope that everything continues to work,” says volunteer Willo Schaaij. Many local residents also think this way, as NH makes a tour of the church’s immediate neighbors.
Trusted
“I think it’s great that they are doing it again,” says neighbor Anneke Zandvliet. “The sound is familiar, nice and cozy. It belongs to a church and a village. People miss it when it doesn’t work.”
And guess what? In a time of mobile phones and smartwatches, Aalsmeer residents prefer to rely on the old-fashioned church bells. “I count and then I know what time it is,” says Anneke.
Neighbor Kees Valkenburg often looks at the clock when he returns from a run in the morning. “Then I know whether I ran fast or slow that day.”
Nice and quiet
A few miss the silence of the past year. “It was so nice and quiet on Sunday morning. All that useless calling!”, writes Aalsmeerder Piet van Leeuwen on Facebook, for example.