Powerful gale lashes Europe; seven dead amid traffic chaos
The Associated Press A powerful storm pummeled Europe with high winds and snow Thursday, killing at least seven people in three countries, grounding flights, halting trains, ripping roofs off buildings and flipping over trucks.
The Dutch national weather service recorded wind gusts of up to 87 mph in the southern port of Hook of Holland as the storm passed.
Amsterdam’s Schiphol briefly halted flights for an hour in the morning, and airline KLM scrapped more than 200 flights even before the storm arrived. Trains were halted across the nation and in Germany.
Falling trees killed two 62-year-old men in the Netherlands, a woman south of the Belgian capital of Brussels, a 59-year-old man camping in the German town of Emmerich and a firefighter in the German town of Bad Salzungen.
In Lippstadt, in western Germany, a driver died when he lost control of his van in strong winds and drove into oncoming traffic. In German’s eastern state of Brandenburg, police said a gust of wind flipped a truck over a highway, killing the driver.
Police spokeswoman Jose Albers told Dutch national broadcaster NOS that authorities also were investigating whether the powerful gusts were to blame for the death of a 66-year-old man who fell through a plexiglass roof in the central town of Vuren.
Social media in the Netherlands was flooded with images of people being blown from their bicycles, cargo containers falling off a ship and damage to buildings, including a roof that peeled off an apartment block in Rotterdam.
Water authorities in the low-lying nation closed an inflatable storm barrier east of Amsterdam to prevent flooding as the storm pushed up water levels.
Traffic on Dutch roads was plunged into chaos, with the wind blowing over tractor trailers, toppling trees and hampering efforts to clean up the mess. In Amsterdam, authorities temporarily halted all trams and closed the city’s zoo.
In neighboring Belgium, the port of Ghent closed because of the wind, and tram traffic was halted in parts of Brussels.
In Germany, police reported several injuries as well as the four deaths, and the national railway company
South cleans up after unusually intense storm that killed 15.
Southerners shoveled, scraped and plowed their way Thursday out of a snowy deep freeze that caused a standstill across much of a region accustomed to mild winters.
At least 15 people died, including a baby in a car that slid off an icy street outside New Orleans, and a 6year-old boy who sledded onto a roadway in Virginia.
Authorities across the South urged drivers to stay off treacherous roads. Louisiana highways remained closed much of the day, and New Orleans residents were avoiding showers to restore pressure to a system plagued by frozen pipes. Atlanta was returning to normal slowly after being frozen in its tracks by about an inch of snow.
All this raises a familiar question: Why do severe winters seem to catch Southerners unprepared? Experts on disaster planning say it’s tough to justify maintaining fleets of snow plows when the weather only occasionally gets nasty. suspended long-distance trains across the country because train tracks were littered with fallen trees. That came hours after all trains in two of Germany’s populous western areas were halted.