Near excursion destination

4 people’s lives in danger after lightning strikes in Dresden

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(Bild: stock.adobe.com/Libor)

Ten people were injured in a lightning strike on Monday evening near a popular excursion destination in Dresden. Four of them are still in mortal danger. Weather expert Jörg Kachelmann warned that it was only due to the fact that it had been a "lightning strike" that there were no fatalities. People had forgotten "what to do when thunderclouds roll in", Kachelmann said angrily on Platform X. 

The lightning struck on the banks of the Elbe in the evening of Whit Monday - in the immediate vicinity of the Rose Garden. The fire department reported on social media that the thunderstorm cell had passed over the city at around 5 p.m. and that there had been a mass influx of injured people. 

Here, the spokesperson for the Dresden fire department reports on the operation:

Four people suffered such serious injuries that their lives were in danger. Two 27 and 30-year-old men were resuscitated after suffering cardiac arrest.

Helicopter searched for more injured people
A total of three women and seven men aged between 26 and 41 were injured. They had complained of typical symptoms after a lightning strike, such as tingling in the extremities. According to the information provided, all patients received emergency medical treatment and were then transferred to nearby hospitals. The police cordoned off the area and a helicopter was also deployed to find any other injured people.

In this article you can see photos of the operation - an hour after the lightning struck, the sun was shining again:

The German Weather Service in Leipzig had warned of severe thunderstorms in parts of Saxony in the early evening. In Dresden, among other places, there was a thunderstorm risk of level two out of four. It was initially unclear exactly how the disaster occurred. The police are investigating.

Kachelmann warns of "murderous summer"
Weather expert Kachelmann suspected that the tragedy could have been avoided. "It will be a murderous summer if the potato collective has generally forgotten what to do when thunderclouds roll in," was his harsh verdict on X (see article above). He polemically stated that "seminars on YouTube and TikTok" were probably needed. 

The warning time would have been shorter than usual because the cell had just formed over Dresden, Kachelmann explained in another post. Nevertheless, he finds it incomprehensible that "people were still outside" after the first lightning struck seven minutes before the actual event.