Rural residents in Šiauliai District are cleaning up and recovering from Saturday night’s tornado, which destroyed several houses and outbuildings, and damaged gardens. Some people were left homeless.
A family from the village of Meškiškė in Šiauliai District say what they experienced on Saturday night was a horror they are still recovering from.
A tornado devastated their house in a matter of seconds. The mother says she barely had time to take shelter with her children in a gazebo. They were slightly injured by breaking glass and falling furniture.
“I just grabbed the children to hold them and I got hit myself, in the head, when the thing started. I feel dizzy, nauseous, I don’t know how it’s going to be,” the woman told LRT TV.
“All the cupboards, everything here started flying around the gazebo, the wind was breaking trees. It was a matter of seconds – two seconds and there was nothing left,” she recalled.
The tornado devastated several neighbouring villages in Šiauliai District, and the inhabitants of Einoraičiai were the worst affected. Several buildings were destroyed, roofs were torn off and cars were badly damaged. A young family was left homeless.
“The most important thing is that everyone is alive, and the rest is life’s lessons,” said a resident of Einoraičiai.
“We went out into the yard and the cars were all smashed up, everything. I had just bought a car and it’s badly damaged,” said another woman.
On Sunday, the villagers were cleaning up. A farmer and his workers collected building debris from a grain field. Electricity supply had not been restored yet. On Monday, municipal authorities plan to declare an emergency.
“We will bring in containers to collect the debris. It has been agreed that they will sort the asbestos slate. We will take it away for free. Tomorrow, the emergency operations centre is convening. We will see what the specialists advise, but we will declare an emergency and I think people will not be able to survive without the municipality’s help,” Česlovas Greičius, the mayor of Šiauliai District, told LRT TV.
“But we will have to appeal to the government for help because the situation is tragic,” he added.
According to meteorologists, the tornado is a localised but very dangerous phenomenon that can form in a matter of hours. Wind speeds in a tornado can reach around 30-50m/s.
“Looking forward, the effects of climate change, the increasing frequency of stormier summers, it is likely that tornadoes in the country will become more frequent. They are actually very rare in our country,” explained Simona Dalinkevičiūtė.
Over the weekend, Poland was also hit by the elements. Summer tornadoes have already become a recurrent phenomenon there.
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