Well, the power went out less than five minutes after my posting last night, came back one for a few minutes half an hour later but than went back out again. It turns out that there’s not much to do without power. Reading by candlelight is not much fun, so we watched a movie on André’s laptop (which had a full battery) and went to bed early. We woke up around 11:30 pm when the power – and the lights – went back on.

Right now, it’s still quite windy, and it has just started to rain. It’s not light outside yet, but it seems like we made it through the storm okay. The trees are still standing, the house wasn’t damaged, and the only thing left to do seems to be setting the clocks on some appliances.

A storm warning for the entire country has been issued here in Germany, even an extreme storm warning for some parts.

“Der Deutsche Wetterdienst (DWD) gibt wegen des verheerenden Sturms für die Mittelgebirge, Teile der Bundesländer Baden-Württemberg, Bayern, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Hessen, Thüringen, Sachsen, Sachsen-Anhalt, Rheinland-Pfalz und das Saarland eine extreme Unwetterwarnung heraus. Für die anderen Regionen galt eine Unwetterwarnung.” (Quelle: Spiegel online)

Take a look at this map at the Deutsche Wetterdienst: Warnsituation.

It has been very windy here since last night, but not too bad. Even though the storm had not started in earnest yet, we ended classes early today like many other schools so the kids were able to go home safely. When I came home from school later in ther afternoon (there’s a lot of extra work at school at the moment because of the imminent report cards), two neighbouring towns had power outages and almost noone was out on the roads. As you can see, we still have electricity, but the light already flickered a few times…

But I’m not really worried that anything really serious could happen. There are no big old trees that could fall onto our house, so we should be quite safe here.

Last night I was sitting at my desk marking some tests (again!) when I felt the floor shake a little at ten past eleven. Hey, i thought, an earthquake?! But André thought it felt more like a small explosion.

At a quarter to one – I was still working but André had gone to sleep – the floor shook again. This time I was quite sure it was an earthquake, but the earthquake website for our state (Landesamt für Geologie und Bergbau Rheinland-Pfalz, Erdebenbereignisse) doesn’t update in real time, it seems.

Today, both earthquakes showed up: the one at 23:10 and the one at 0:46 (the times given on the pages are UTC, which is one hour behind us). We live on the lower left corner of those maps, by the way.

The earthquakes had a magnitude of 2.3 and 1.6 respectively, which is not all that much even when the epicenter is only ten or twelve kilometres (about seven or eight miles) away. Take a look at this map of Rhineland-Palatinate (we live a bit to the Northwest of the W in Wiesbaden): Quite a few earthquakes have happened around here between 2000 and now, but we’ve been living here for only a few years, so I still find it noteworthy when one happens.

Maybe I won’t be quite as excited and more scared once I experience one that’s over a 5.0, but fortunately those are very rare here.