Major downpours in the Oslo area were keeping emergency crews busy on Monday. Oslo’s fire brigade said that all available personnel and seven emergency vehicles were out to help residents and motorists deal with the latest deluge.
Norwegian Broadcasting (NRK) reported that the first calls for help came from the neighbourhoods of Vindern, Hovseter and Sogn. “Now calls are coming in from all over Oslo, and we’re talking about large amounts of water,” Bjørnar Aronsen, shift leader for the Oslo Brann og redningsetat, told NR at around 3pm.
Aronsen said the emergency crews don’t have enough pumps to help everybody with flooded property. They also need to help clear flooded streets in many areas, after torrential rain, lightning and thunder hit the Norwegian capital once again.
At the University of Oslo at Blindern, where students are returning for classes this week, many opted to just take off their shoes and wade over flooded walkways and plazas. There was so much hail at Sagene in Oslo that the streets turned white, and the area around the Blindern metro stop was flooded.
Thunderstorms led to torrential rainfall in several other areas in southern and central Norway over the weekend as well, with hail around Norefjell that also turned some areas white. In Trøndelag, several families were isolated by a flood at Vellamelen in Steinkjer. The state waterways agency NVE (Norges Vassdrags- og energidirektorat) posted flood warnings for the Trøndelag counties and Møre og Romsdal.
State meteorologist Krisetn Gislefoss said neither he nor his colleagues could be sure that the bad weather was over. “There was a lot of quite powerful thunder and cloudbursts, and they organized themselves well, with some areas getting most of the rain and others much less,” Gislefoss told NRK. The weather in Oslo was expected to be just as unstable on Tuesday.
“We’ll see lots of the same sort of weather, with thunder also,” he said.
newsinenglish.no/Nina Berglund
