Ireland, the UK and France faced travel chaos on Saturday and one person died as a winter storm battered northwest Europe with strong winds, heavy rain, snow and ice.
Hampshire Police in southern England said a man died after a tree fell onto a car on a major road near Winchester early in the day.
Police in West Yorkshire said they were probing whether a second death from a traffic incident was linked to the storm. It is understood the road was not icy at the time of the incident.
Photo: REUTERS
Storm Bert left at least 60,000 properties in Ireland without power, and closed roads and some ferry and train routes on both sides of the Irish Sea.
Channel ports and airports in the UK were badly affected while in France, tens of thousands remained without power after Storm Caetano on Thursday. Hundreds of passengers were stranded when trains were halted by power cuts.
Media footage showed flooding in the west of Ireland, which also caused rail closures in Northern Ireland. Snow impacted travel across the UK. The heaviest snow hit Scotland and parts of northern and central England, with dozens of flood alerts in place.
Photo: Reuters
The UK Meteorological Office issued snow and ice warnings for those regions, saying there was a “good chance some rural communities could be cut off.”
Scottish hills could see up to 40cm of snow, while winds approaching 113kph were recorded in the UK. Ferry operator DFDS cancelled services on some routes until Monday, with sailings from Newhaven and Dover in southern England to Dieppe and Calais in France severely affected.
Flights were disrupted at Newcastle International Airport due to heavy snow, with some flights diverted to Belfast and Edinburgh.
Avanti West Coast, which runs rail services between England and Scotland, advised customers not to attempt travel beyond the northern English city of Preston, as it cancelled numerous trains.
UK National Highways also issued a “severe weather alert,” warning of “blizzard conditions” affecting Yorkshire and northeast England, with a number of road closures announced.
The worst affected areas for power outages in Ireland were in western and northwestern counties, said ESB Networks, which runs the country’s electricity system.
“Crews and contractors are deployed and restoring power in impacted areas where it is safe to do so,” it said.
In the UK, the National Grid operator said power had been restored to “many homes and businesses,” but more than 4,000 properties across the country were still without electricity on Saturday — the majority in southwest England.
About 47,000 homes remained without power in northern France on Saturday, two days after the country was battered by Storm Caetano, power company Enedis said.
Up to 270,000 people had been cut off due to the storm but Enedis said it had 2,000 technicians working to reconnect electricity lines torn down by winds of up to 130kph.
Several hundred passengers were stranded on two trains in western France halted by power cuts.
About 200 people on a train going from Hendaye to Bordeaux and 400 on high-speed TGV going from Hendaye to Paris spent up to nine hours in the carriages.
French Minister Delegate for Transport Francois Dourovray told RTL radio that up to 1,000 passengers on different trains were affected by the power cut.
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