Three dead as Storm Ophelia batters Ireland

GALWAY, Ireland, (Reuters) - Three people died as Tropical Storm Ophelia battered every corner of Ireland yesterday, knocking down trees and power lines and whipping up 10-metre (30-foot) waves.

Over 330,000 homes and businesses were without electricity in the Republic of Ireland at 1915 GMT, down from an earlier peak of 370,000. Ireland’s Electricity Supply Board described it as an unprecedented event that would affect every part of the country for days.

About 200 flights from Ireland’s two main airports at Dublin and Shannon were cancelled. The airports will reopen on Tuesday as the cleanup begins.

Two people were killed in separate incidents when trees fell on their cars - a woman in her 50s in the southeast and a man on the east coast. Another man in his 30s died while trying to clear a fallen tree in an incident involving a chainsaw.

The storm, downgraded from a hurricane overnight, was the worst to hit Ireland in half a century. It made landfall after 10:40 a.m. (0940 GMT), the Irish National Meteorological Service said, with winds as strong as 190 kph (110 mph) hitting the most southerly tip of the country.

There was some flooding in the western city of Galway, but the stormforce winds were set to clear the rest of the country by midnight and conditions return to normal on Tuesday.

“There are still dangers out there but the cleanup has started in some areas and the job of getting the country back to work has begun,” the chairman of Ireland’s National Emergency Coordination Group, Sean Hogan, told a news conference.