BERLIN, June 30 (Xinhua) -- Traffic stood still and fire departments were being called to thousands of individual missions on Friday after torrential rains swept over the German capital.
Numerous streets and cellars were flooded in Berlin after parts of the city were inundated with 150 liters of rain per square meter in less than 24 hours. A speaker of the Berlin water authority described the weather as a once in a hundred years event, noting that the city's annual precipitation only amounted to 580 liters per square meter on average.
Images and videos on social media showed cars and buses trapped by the masses of water. Some Metro services are still interrupted. Parts of one of Germany's busiest motorways, the A 100 were closed to the south of the city.
Passengers travelling in and out of Berlin's Tegel and Schoenefeld airports experienced severe delays. The ban on nighttime flights at Tegel airport was lifted in an exceptional measure to allow stranded individuals to continue on with their journeys.
The local fire department had declared a state of emergency as early as Wednesday, but expected the storms to continue. In the course of Friday, the current weather pattern is expected to gradually move northwards away from the capital towards the states of Schleswig-Holstein, Hamburg and Lower Saxony.
Berlin firefighters on Thursday confirmed 2000 deployments by 8:25 pm local time, a number usually only reached on New Years' Eve.
A house in the district of Charlottenburg was temporarily evacuated after authorities became concerned it could collapse. All inhabitants were able to return to their homes again on Friday.
Before the violent rainstorm, June had been an unusually warm and sunny month in Germany with temperatures measuring 2.6 degrees Celsius higher than the historical average. In total, the month was the fourth warmest measured since the beginning of regular recordings in 1881.
