Storms Boelo and Austen Leave One Dead and Over 150,000 Homes Without Power Across Northern Europe
Two storms passing within 24 hours knocked out electricity in the UK, France and Germany, injured people in several countries and disrupted hundreds of flights.
By Khalid Khalil ·
A pair of storms sweeping across northern Europe has left one man dead, cut electricity to more than 150,000 homes and disrupted air travel and mobile phone networks, according to authorities in the affected countries.
Storms Boelo and Austen moved through the region within 24 hours of each other. By Sunday, more than 82,000 homes in the United Kingdom, nearly 60,000 in France and at least 10,000 in Germany were still without power.
In Scotland, a 60-year-old man died on Sunday after a tree fell in the southwest of the country. Another falling tree injured two women in central Scotland, the Press Association reported. Gusts of up to 135 km/h (84 mph) were recorded in the Argyll and Bute areas of western Scotland, and fallen trees and power cables blocked roads and rail lines across Scotland and northern England.
On England's south coast, Austen blew away an unused pier in Brighton on Friday. Authorities have warned of flood risks in parts of both Scotland and England. The Met Office, the UK's national forecaster, said Boelo posed a danger to life from flying debris and crashing waves, and urged people to stay indoors as much as possible.
Across the English Channel, the storms marked Europe's first big blow of the autumn. French energy company Enedis said that at the peak of Austen on Saturday, about 288,000 homes had no electricity. By midday Sunday, some 59,000 remained without power, mainly in Normandy and Brittany. A marathon runner in northern France suffered light injuries when strong winds toppled a tree during the race.
In Germany, Austen cut power on Sunday to 10,000 homes in and around the southwestern town of Freiburg-Breisgau. The town's main hospital said it had to restrict its service to emergency cases because of the outage, which also took down the mobile phone network. German police reported that two people were seriously hurt on Saturday when winds blew away scaffolding at a market in the town of Nastatten.
Belgium and the Netherlands were also affected. Falling trees injured four people in Brussels on Saturday. North of the island of Schiermonnikoog in the Netherlands, three crew members aboard a freight ship were hurt, according to the Dutch coastguard. Two of them were winched off the vessel and flown by helicopter to a hospital on the mainland.
The weather forced hundreds of flights to be cancelled or diverted across northern Europe, including at Amsterdam's Schiphol airport, one of the continent's busiest hubs. Experts have warned that climate change is likely to bring more extreme weather events.
Source: Al Jazeera
