Thousands of liters of water enter the supermarket, but customers... (Mechelen)

Mechelen –

Due to the thunderstorm, the water fell from the sky in buckets on Friday evening. Also in Mechelen, where this Carrefour express was largely flooded. It was thousands of liters of water. Customers who had wet feet were still welcome during the clearing.

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Sven Van Haezendonck, Theo Derkinderen

Yesterday at 11:00–

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It rained hard on Friday, so hard that in many places the sewers could no longer absorb the rainwater. Also on the Battelsesteenweg in Mechelen and they knew that in the Carrefour express. “The excess water simply ran into the store through our parking lot. There was no stopping it,” says manager Werner Verhoeven. He has been running his supermarket in Mechelen for eleven years.

Flooding was not new to him. “In our early years, we sometimes struggled with it several times a year, but it had been a few years now. But that bad? No, I didn’t know that yet,” says the man.

Staff members and job students were busy on Friday to get the store dry again. Thousands of liters of rainwater poured into the building unhindered. As a result, a large part of the store was several centimeters under water.

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Manager Werner Verhoeven in his flooded store. — © Sven Van Haezendonck

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Anyone who came to do the shopping was guaranteed to have wet feet. Still, there were many customers who took the risk. The manager is not yet able to say how extensive the damage is. “That remains to be seen. Electrical appliances may have been damaged,” says Verhoeven. Here and there, his products have also suffered damage in the store.

Also water at neighbors

Fortunately, he got help from the fire brigade to combat the flooding. The Rivierenland fire department sent a team from the Mechelen post to pump water from its overflow pit. “I estimate that it can easily handle ten thousand liters of water, but with such a thunderstorm it is full in no time,” says Werner Verhoeven. The underground parking garage of the residents of a neighboring apartment building was also flooded.

A local resident is angry and blames the problems on clogged sewer drains. According to an employee of the city, people really throw everything into those wells when that is not allowed: oil, cement residues and leftovers of paint. “That causes problems,” he says. The manager of the affected supermarket does not want to point the finger at anyone. “This is a case of force majeure. It doesn’t rain that much every day,” says Verhoeven.