On a more serious note...
I was trawling through my usual (official and unofficial) sources of pre-flight information, including the EAD (Eurocontrol) site, homebriefing.nl, met'map, wetterzentrale.de and the official Dutch Met pages (
KNMI - Koninklijk Nederlands Meteorologisch Instituut) and I found no trace whatsoever of the SIGMET reports in which this little event is described. Even a Google search for SIGMET BIRK or SIGMET EHAA gave surprisingly little information (though enough to understand what's going on).
So I'm a bit worried that my normal pre-flight routine would not have picked up this event. Until the NOTAMs start appearing that airports are closed, or until the METARS/TAFs start reporting VA.
So what's the "official" source for sigmet information that you use? Would your routine have picked this up, and if so, how/where?