Storms Austen and Boelo: one dead, homes left without power
· BehindLines newsroom
Two storms, less than twenty-four hours apart, swept across north-western Europe over the weekend. Austen struck on Saturday 24 October and Boelo on Sunday 25. According to an AFP report published by Phys.org, they left more than 150,000 households in Britain, France and Germany without electricity at one point or another, disrupted roads, trains and flights, and killed at least one person.
In Scotland, a 60-year-old man was killed on Sunday morning when a tree fell on him on a road near Castle Douglas, in Dumfries and Galloway, the British agency PA reported in a story carried by the Cotswold Journal. The Met Office had put part of the country under an amber wind warning. Transport Scotland warned that restoring the network would take time. British outage totals vary with the way they are counted: PA cites 838,700 properties affected over the two storms, with 90,600 still without power on Sunday evening.
In France, grid operator Enedis counted around 288,000 homes without electricity at the height of Austen on Saturday. By midday Sunday some 59,000 were still waiting, mostly in Normandy and Brittany, and 2,600 technicians had been deployed. In Germany, 10,000 homes lost power on Sunday around Freiburg im Breisgau; the city's main hospital restricted its work to emergencies because the blackout also took down the mobile network, AFP said. In Nastätten, scaffolding torn loose by the wind seriously injured two people on Saturday.
Al Jazeera and Euronews reported hundreds of flights cancelled or diverted, including at Amsterdam's Schiphol airport, and gusts close to 135 km/h in Argyll and Bute.
Autumn storms are not unusual in themselves. But the quick succession left crews little time to make repairs between gales, and trees still in leaf catch far more wind than they do in winter. Climate scientists point out that a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, which can make rainfall heavier, although no single storm can be blamed on warming on its own.
For households, the episode shows how exposed overhead lines are to falling trees. As heating, cooking and cars switch to electricity, an outage of a few hours weighs more heavily than it used to. Burying lines and cutting back trees in advance are therefore back on the agenda for grid operators. British forecasters expected another low-pressure system early in the week, though they judged it weaker than the previous two.