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Ammon News - A woman was killed and two people injured by a large Christmas tree that fell over during stormy weather in the Belgian town of Oudenaarde, authorities said on Friday.

Security camera footage on Belgian news media showed a brightly lit 20-metre (66ft) high Christmas tree slowly leaning over, then collapsing next to a Christmas market in the town, east of Brussels, on Thursday as a merry-go-round turned in the historic market square.

A spokesperson for the Oost-Vlaanderen province prosecutor said the victim was a 63-year old woman from Oudenaarde. Two women from the same town were lightly injured. “The investigation will focus on whether the tree had been properly secured and will also look at the impact of the weather,” he said.

Storm Pia, which disrupted traffic in the UK and the Netherlands on Thursday, also hit western Belgium, where the weather service issued a yellow code warning for the coastal areas.

The storm caused one death in the Netherlands, where a woman died of her injuries on Friday after she was hit by a falling tree the previous day, her employer, the healthcare organisation ZoZijn, said.


The Guardian