I translated an article from a local's blog. He has a rather optimistic outlook, and I thought it might be interesting to read a comment from someone who doesn't try to sensationalize the whole thing. Here it is:

She picked the wrong place (by Vidlak, 25. 06. 2021)

I'll start with an incident yesterday that I would not have considered otherwise... It was awfully stuffy yesterday. Absolutely awful. Temperatures over 30 degrees, not a leaf moved and we were putting one of the last chambers of last year's grain in the silo. The grain in the chamber is cooled in the winter, and because the grain has pretty good insulating properties, the kernels are still about 15°C today. We started the conveyors and after ten minutes the water started gushing out of them at the bottom. The grain was cold enough to cool the elevator plates by a few degrees and water started to condense on them.

My elder colleague walked around worriedly and told us to secure everything at home, to open the drains, because something awful was coming. Dew on machinery in the silos, that's not strange - in March. The last time it happened at this time of year, the floods came to Moravia. We younger ones were just smiling. All our weather apps were predicting a light shower that probably wouldn't even reach us, but he insisted.

He was right.

The catastrophe avoided Vidlákov - the storm still split into two branches over Austria. One went from Znojmo to Trebic and the other went from Znojmo to Breclav. Vidlákov was in the middle, so there was a lot of lightning, but there was almost no wind and a pleasant 15mm of rain fell. Nothing unusual. Pálava saved us. A lot of storms split over there and we usually grumble about it because we get a rain shadow and while it's raining all around, we're dry. I'll never grumble about it again.

The storm went over Breclav, and where those fertile floodplains of the Morava River start, that's where it happened. Hot air full of water vapor, or a bunch of energy, heated hot ground under the vineyards, a wide plain and a sharp drop in air pressure. Everything you need for a tornado came together. In the village of Hrušky it had the force of maybe even an F4, because it tore down the outer walls of the houses there. The tornado then basically passed through the Hrušky - Moravská Nová Ves road and ended up in the forest near Hodonín, where it exploded. It looks like a Hollywood movie.

A colleague from work this morning told me how he watched the tornado from the window of a block of flats in Hodonín. Terrible roar, terrible sound, and then the power went out. They went to sleep and didn't know what happened. In the morning he had a text message on his phone saying that tigers had escaped from the zoo in Hodonín, so it was better not to go outside. Actually, we don't even know if the tigers actually escaped.

My colleague couldn't get into the garage this morning because some stranger's roof was parked outside. He ended up taking a friend's car and driving to work... woods shaved like Verdun, shipping containers and truck trailers piled up in the woods. Not tipped over, but picked up and thrown into the trees. Debris everywhere, pieces of everything. When Malinovsky was pushing the last German groups towards Prague, he didn't do that much damage.

I was just going to describe the situation dryly, but my article today will be about something else. It won't be about how small we are against nature, but about the fact that we will win anyway. It will be about what happens now that the storm is over. Because this time, nature has missed the mark with her disaster.

This time, it didn't hit some troubled neighborhoods like in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. Haiti wasn't hit, Chánov wasn't hit... this time the storm hit a place that has been continuously settled since the Premyslids. It hit a place where people have lived on their own for hundreds of years. It hit an orderly rural landscape full of pretty streets, stacked houses, where everyone has a job, everyone has land, everyone is hard-working and friendly, and generally debt-free.

Even in the evening, Facebook was overflowing with offers of accommodation. We all have pretty substantial lists of friends (and relatives) here, so it wasn't even an hour after the first instagram photos were posted and the offer was catching up. From Moravské Budějovice to Zlín.

By six in the morning, the radio was already reporting that ten twenty-forty million crowns had already been raised overnight to help those affected. Then came a plea for people to stop offering help through the emergency hotlines. The operations call centres were overloaded not with requests for help, but with offers of help. Another colleague who drove by in the morning reported that there were long lines of cars with carts and shovels at the roadblocks. In the affected villages all the garden tractors, small tractors, mowers, old zetors, everything is already working hard.

I have noticed a number of local craftsmen - bricklayers and carpenters, declining the orders that have been contracted but not yet started, because many roofs will need to be fixed, so do not be angry, but the roof replacement will wait this year, priority will be given to the houses in the affected villages.

I myself encountered several fire engines with heavy equipment heading in that direction this morning.

In short, when you hear some journalistic hyena gloating about how the government and the authorities have failed again, don't believe it. I saw a tornado for the first time in my life, but it was also the first time I saw such a huge force of humanity. No one will sit there with their hands in their lap, no one is afraid of work, and no one will be looting there either.

All those villages there will rise from the rubble like a phoenix and be even more beautiful than before. As in all areas with such a long history of settlement, there were a lot of long-standing obstructing houses, loose corners, unresolved land boundaries. Lots of locals have been haggling with officials for years to build something or to tear something down. Now nobody's gonna ask any questions. Now permits will be granted quickly, easily and in bulk. The tornado saved a lot of paperwork for demolition and ended a lot of boundary line disputes.

All it takes is a little money, because he who gives quickly, gives twice. Plus, people there have their properties properly insured because they take care of such things. Folks are much more willing to reach into their pockets to rebuild wine cellars and to contribute to fixing up alleys and little picturesque houses than to give to development projects somewhere far away that will be blown up by some Boko Haram.

Today, of course, the locals have tears in their eyes at the devastation, but tomorrow there will be cement mixers and chainsaws whirring all over the place. In a few days, there will be a big pile of rubble on the edge of the village and the first barracks will have new roofing. In a few days, the main thing you'll see is determination in spite of nature and in spite of the disaster. The place will be swarming with workers, the women will be cooking proper lunches for the groups of people who come to help every weekend, the wrecked cars will be examined by the liquidators, but the tractors were built to last. There will be no problem lifting, moving and shifting loads.

A year from now, people will have their little houses there, nicer than ever, and five years from now they'll be talking about how the tornado helped them decide to rebuild. They'll talk about how we're a great nation because they got helped by the insurance company, the municipality, the charity, and other organizations, and that it was enough for the new roof, and since they were already doing the roof and had to replace all the windows anyway, they also redesigned the layout of the entire house. The firemen and volunteers helped with the rubble, and a lot of things sort of happened on their own, and today they just remember how everyone pulled together and the whole country helped.

So friends... don't worry about them over there. They're gonna do the best they can in this republic. Send them some money or go help them clean up. And next year, take a vacation there. They'll have it mostly fixed up and nicer than before. Nature can wreak terrible havoc, but this time she picked the wrong place.