January 8, 2005
Yahoo News
Photo: A car drives along a flooded road in southern Denmark. At least 14 people died, more than 1,000 homes were flooded and hundreds of thousands left without power after violent storms battered northern Europe over the weekend, bringing hurricane force winds and heavy rain.(AFP/SCANPIX/Palle Hedemann)
LONDON (AFP) - At least 14 people died, more than 1,000 homes were flooded and hundreds of thousands left without power after violent storms battered northern Europe over the weekend, bringing hurricane force winds and heavy rain.
Denmark, Sweden and the British Isles were worst affected, with 100 people forced to spend the night on a ferry after it ran aground Saturday in southwest Scotland, while a Dutch freighter issued a mayday call off the Danish coast.
The passenger ferry was later floated and towed to its berth after more than 30 hours at sea, with none on board injured, while the 15 crew members of the Dutch cargo ship which got into difficulties were rescued.
At least 11 people were reported dead in Denmark and Sweden, leaving 405,000 households without power, disrupting road and rail traffic and causing heavy damage.
In Britain, three people were found dead in Carlisle in northwest England, where one of the worst storms for decades brought flooding and high winds, police said, though they were unable to give the cause of death.
Some people in the town had to be rescued by helicopter from the roof of their houses surrounded by floodwater and cars were seen floating down streets.
Fifteen families had to be airlifted to safety while thousands of other people left their homes on their own initiative, police said.
Emergency services were still looking for two people carried away by floodwater, one by the river Aire at Apperley Bridge near Bradford and another near Forres in Scotland.
In southern Sweden, four motorists were killed when uprooted trees fell on their cars. A fifth was killed by a passing car when he tried to remove a fallen tree from a road, and another man sustained fatal injuries on his farm when bales of hay came crashing down on him during the storm.
Yet another man fell to his death from the roof of his home as tried to secure tiles, media reported.
In Denmark, police said two motorists died when trees tumbled onto their cars. Two other people were killed when they were hit by a roof that blew off a building in nearby Assens.
Winds in western Denmark reached speeds of up to 151 kilometers (94 miles) an hour when the storm hit on Saturday, the Danish DMI meteorological service said.
Many homes were left without power. In Sweden alone, some 405,000 households were left without electricity by Sunday, primarily in the southern and western parts of the country, power companies Vattenfall, Sydkraft and Fortum said.
The storm also lashed northern Germany, where police divers were searching for two boating enthusiasts who went missing after their kayak overturned.
In Russia authorities in Saint Petersburg closed off embankments to traffic and shut six subway stations as high water levels threatened the former imperial capital with flooding.
Several regions of northern Poland were also hit by high winds.
And more than 100 people were evacuated from coastal towns in western Estonia as the storms hit regions on the Baltic Sea causing flooding.
All train traffic in southern Sweden was suspended, and car and train traffic on the Oeresund bridge linking Copenhagen to southern Sweden was also stopped because of the storm.
"There are uprooted trees in several places, rooftiles blown onto the tracks near Helsingborg (in southern Sweden)... It's chaos right now," Mattias Hennius, a spokesman for the Swedish rail authority Banverket told Swedish news agency TT.
Emergency crews were having a hard time reaching people in need of help.
Dozens of ferry routes to and from Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Britain and Germany were cancelled, while the Swedish coast guard reported that numerous vessels had anchored in the southern Baltic to seek shelter from the storm.
Around the British Isles, trucks toppled over, river banks burst, people were evacuated from flooded houses and uprooted trees blocked dozens of roads.
About a dozen trucks overturned on a motorway in northwest England several roads were blocked because of flooding and trees falling.
"It's probably one of the most severe (storms) we've seen since the storm of 1987," said a spokesman for the British Meteorological Office, Andy Bodenham.
More bad weather was on the way, he warned.
"The outlook is still quite changeable. We are expecting another deep depression to arrive.
"We've got some strong storm force winds (coming) tonight but a more intense depression looks likely to arrive on Tuesday, but this time affecting Scotland, rather than the more built up areas," Bodenham said.
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