Flights canceled, others delayed, the situation became complicated on Wednesday night at the Frankfurt airport, one of the main air traffic hubs in Germany. “Strong storms in the Rhine and Main area of Frankfurt caused flight delays and cancellations. Twenty-three planes had to be diverted to other airports,” a porter at one of Europe’s largest airports told AFP.
“A total of 90 flights were cancelled, 34 planes did not take off before midnight (that is, before the time when night flights are prohibited, editor’s note),” he explained.
The passengers of these planes that could not take off stayed overnight at the airport, either in the hotel or in the several hundred cots set up for this purpose, he continued. Throughout the center and west of the country, the same scenes of flooded streets were repeated, with cars stuck in the water, their drivers barefoot.
A gradual return to normal
In Gelsenkirchen, a Ruhr city in western Germany, water rose up to one meter in some streets. Relief continued to intervene Thursday morning to help victims, according to a news release from the fire department. In the most affected areas of this city of more than 250,000 inhabitants, many trees fell on vehicles and “the roads were partly passable only with inflatable boats.”
If the weather has calmed down, some disruptions to air traffic persist. “The situation should probably stabilize during the day. There are still passengers who need to be redirected to a different flight than the one they had planned,” the airport spokesman said.
Source: BFM TV
