She already smelled something strange, Kim says, from the smoldering remains of her car. It burned out on Tuesday morning, shortly after she parked it in the Strijp-S parking garage in Eindhoven. Although, according to her, the damage could have been many times greater. “Fortunately, it already seems like a bit of a Christmas break.”
Around a quarter past nine, Kim received a call from her husband. “He had just called the police. If I could come to the garage, because the car was on fire.”
She had parked it less than fifteen minutes earlier in the garage on Philitelaan. “I smelled something strange in the car this morning. But at the time I thought it was something like burnt rubber outside. When I put it away, there was nothing wrong.”
How different it was when she returned to the garage a little later. “You hear on the phone that it is burned out and that you can no longer drive it. But when you see that wreck… It scares you a bit.”
Yet Kim seems to be mainly concerned about the car next to hers, which also has some damage. “Mine wasn’t that new anymore. But the one next to it was still really nice. That’s such a shame…”
Although, according to her, the misery could have been much greater. “Yesterday I parked here in a full garage. Now it is a lot quieter.” A spokesperson for the fire brigade agrees. “There were only about forty cars on this floor now. If it had been full, we would never have had the capacity to extinguish it quickly.”
Kim has no choice but to cry. “What a misery. Now we have to wait for the recovery crews to arrive. Nice start to the day.”