Storm leaves Ogre isolated from outside world for hours

Ogre, a city in Latvia, was without electricity and mobile communications for hours after the storm, leaving residents effectively cut off from the outside world, LSM reported.

The outages began on Saturday evening. On Sunday morning, shops and petrol stations in the city were still closed, prompting some residents to drive closer to Riga to get information and buy food.

The storm damage remained visible across Ogre, with trees and branches brought down, traffic lights out of service and supermarkets closed. Residents arrived one after another, only to find the lights off and the doors shut. Some charged their phones in their cars.

Local petrol stations resumed operations around midday, and queues soon began to form. Gundars filled a can with fuel for a generator that had helped his household through the power cut.

“It was a pity that we did not know what was really happening. It was clear that there had been a storm, but generators should have been installed everywhere for communications,” he said.

Electricity and mobile communications gradually returned around midday, followed by the reopening of the first shops. Residents interviewed by LSM said they had experienced such a situation for the first time, prompting them to consider how prepared they were for unexpected emergencies.

The storm that struck Latvia during the night was the country’s strongest summer storm since at least 1966, according to the Latvian Environment, Geology and Meteorology Centre. A person was killed when a new building collapsed in Jelgava.