One minute you’re enjoying your summer vacation carefree, a few hours later you’re being pelted with hailstones the size of tennis balls. It happens to Dutch holidaymakers at Lake Garda. “I have never experienced such a storm.”
Monday evening it starts to haunt Lake Garda around ten o’clock, says Kevin Mallie from Maassluis. “We sat on the terrace and I saw the clouds acting quite strange, with flashes and thunder. It looked nice, I took pictures of it. Until it came our way and it went completely wild in one go. It sounded like gunfire, a kind of war zone.”
With his wife, mother and two young children, they run to their mobile home for shelter. “We went under the table and under the bed. We heard the shattering of glass and saw the windows of the caravan being smashed out. The weather was really intense. We have never experienced anything like this.”
‘Windshield cracked’
His family is fine, although shocked by the hellish night. “But I also saw a lady who got such a hailball on her head and immediately fainted. At the reception all wounded were sitting with cloths around their heads; some of them had to go to the hospital.”
The material damage is great. “There is no mobile home here that still has windows. My car can’t be used for the time being, I’m afraid. The windshield is cracked, there are about five tennis ball marks on the side, the headlights and mirrors have blown off.” His 8-year-old daughter interrupts the conversation: “Have my books stayed dry?”
‘Slept in emergency shelter’
A little further on, it also went wild. “The holiday turned into a nightmare,” says Natascha van Beek from Zoetermeer. She is with her husband and two children on a campsite in Lazise. “Our caravan is broken and wet inside. The awning is broken and the rear window of the car is out. We can’t get the insurance company on the phone. Last night we slept in the emergency shelter that the campsite had set up. I don’t know yet where we’ll sleep tonight.”
Weather organization Estofex had predicted ‘extremely dangerous storms’ for parts of Italy, Switzerland, Austria and Slovenia. In addition to the large hailstones, streets in Milan were flooded and someone died from a falling tree. The storms are very local and holidaymakers who were just on the other side of Lake Garda have not been affected.
‘Crying people’
“Friends of ours are at a park a few miles away and they only had some wind. With us in Lazise: storms like we’ve never seen before,” says Daan Duinhoven from Laren, who is on the road with his wife and three children.
“My Tesla, which I used to be so careful with, is badly damaged. But luckily that’s just stuff, we were lucky that we didn’t have a hailstone on our head. It was a sad situation: people crying everywhere, ambulances coming and going. I can still hear the sound of the emergency services around me.”
For Duinhoven and many others, it is now a matter of waiting for help from the insurance company in finding replacement transport. Until then, he tries to go on a ‘normal’ holiday as much as possible. “It is not for nothing that we drove all the way here and when the sun starts to shine, that helps a lot. But if I would go to Lake Garda again… you better not ask me now.”