Storm Eunice killed at least nine people in Europe on Friday, pummeling the UK with record-breaking winds and forcing millions to take shelter as it disrupted flights, trains and ferries across western Europe.
London was eerily empty after the British capital was placed under its first ever “red” weather warning, meaning that there was “danger to life.”
By nightfall, London police said that a woman in her 30s had died after a tree fell on a vehicle she was a passenger in.
Photo: AFP
A man in his 50s was also killed in northwest England after debris struck the windscreen of a vehicle he was traveling in, local police said.
Beyond Britain, falling trees killed three people in the Netherlands and a man in his 60s in southeast Ireland, while a Canadian man aged 79 died in Belgium, officials in the respective countries said.
A motorist was killed when their vehicle crashed into a tree that had fallen across a road near Adorp in the Netherlands’ northern province of Groningen. Dozens of homes were evacuated in The Hague amid fears that a church steeple could collapse. Footage showed the steeple wobbling and a large piece of debris falling on a vehicle.
Photo: AFP
In Germany, a motorist died after his vehicle was hit by a tree near the town of Altenberge.
As well as in London, the highest weather alert level was declared across southern England, southern Wales and the Netherlands, with many schools closed and rail travel paralyzed, as towering waves breached sea walls along the coasts.
Meanwhile Eunice’s winds knocked out power to more than 140,000 homes in England, mostly in the southwest, and 80,000 properties in Ireland, utility companies said.
Near London, three people were taken to hospital after sustaining injuries in the storm, and a large section of the roof on the city’s Millennium Dome was shredded by the gales.
One wind gust of 196kph was measured on the Isle of Wight off southern England, which was “provisionally the highest gust ever recorded in England,” the British Meteorological Office said.
Eunice caused high waves to batter the Brittany coast in northwest France, while Belgium, Denmark and Sweden all issued weather warnings. Long-distance and regional trains were halted in northern Germany.
Ferries across the Channel, the world’s busiest shipping lane, were suspended, before the British port of Dover reopened in the late afternoon. Hundreds of flights were canceled or delayed at London’s Heathrow and Gatwick airports. One EasyJet flight from Bordeaux, France, endured two aborted landings at Gatwick — which saw wind gusts peak at 125kph — before being forced to return to France.
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