Guests flee as tornado strikes hotel

  

STUNNED hotel guests were ushered to safety after a tornado ripped the roof off the building as freak weather conditions battered East Anglia.

The twister was first spotted shortly before 5pm on Saturday in the car park of the Days Inn, Phoenix Road, Haverhill.

The storm then ripped up massive strips of the building's aluminium roof and threw them over the road and car park. Luckily, no-one was hurt.

The extreme conditions were particularly unfortunate for the brand new hotel which had only just taken its first paying guests the day before.

Donna Revell, the hotel's manager, said: “I've never seen anything like it before. At the time we had four guests in the hotel and 13 booked in.

“From what we could tell from looking out of the back, we could see a storm travelling around the car park. It then travelled round the front and caught the corner of the roof.

“We then went into autopilot - we immediately enacted our crisis plan, called the fire brigade and got the guests to the nearby pub. We were forced to use the fire exits because the roof was hanging down at the front.”

Hotel worker Taro Rawles said: “I thought at first there were hailstones hitting the window then all this insulating fluff started flapping about, then the roof hit the ground and we decided to get the guests out. It wasn't frightening at the time - I didn't think about it until I got home.”

Andrew Latham, managing director of Speymill contracts, who was inspecting the damage to the roof his firm had built only a few weeks before, said it had been completed to the highest standards.

“There was no fault in the roof,” he said. “Unfortunately it seems to have been a freak of nature. It does look worse than it is as it has only taken off the top layer of the roof except at the corner.”

He estimated the custom-built aluminium roof would now take several weeks to rebuild completely.

At 5pm on the same day a similar twister struck Glemsford, near Sudbury, damaging homes and flattening trees.

Alan Taylor, who was out in the open when the storm struck, said yesterday: “The rain, hail and wind was so intense I could not stand without holding on to some railings as the street was showered with tiles, bits of fence and trees.

“But it was only upon venturing out today that I realised just how much damage was done in that five or ten minutes.”

Police dealt with more than 100 weather-related incidents in Suffolk over the weekend, with many trees falling and blocking roads.

West Suffolk was worst hit, according to a police spokesman, although most areas of the county were affected.

In Essex firefighters were also “inundated” with calls following the high winds and heavy rain. Crews attended about 30 incidents caused by the bad weather on Saturday night.

A spokeswoman said: “Some of the incidents we went to were billboards fallen down, trees across roads, and a marquee that was becoming unsafe in the wind.

“We also took sandbags out to try and stop flood water breaking through river banks and flooding property.

A spokesman for power supplier EDF Energy said about 170 customers in the region were still without electricity last night with strong winds affecting power lines.

At the height of the storm as many as 20,000 customers were off supply in the East of England.

Forecasters at regional weather service WeatherQuest said the unsettled, blustery weather would continue overnight until this morning, but winds would not reach the same force as on Saturday night.

It is expected to stay unsettled for a couple of days, but today should be mostly dry with some patchy rain this morning and sunny spells later on.