At least 14 killed as Storms batter Northern Europe

First the Asian Tsunamis on 26th December, now this.

The predictions made by the earth conservation groups 10 yrs ago are finally coming to reality.

Earth is experiencing MASSIVE climate changes (greenhouse effect, polar ice caps melting, El Nino, etc.) which would trigger more and more freakish weather as we have seen in Asia and now Europe.

Be prepared ppl, for the worst is YET to come!

CARLISLE, England (AFP) - At least 14 people died, more than 1,000 homes were flooded and many more left without power after violent storms battered northern Europe over the weekend, bringing hurricane force winds and heavy rain.

Denmark, Sweden and the British Isles were worst affected, with 100 people forced to spend the night on a ferry after it ran aground Saturday in southwest Scotland, while the crew of a Dutch freighter had to be rescued after they issued a mayday call off the Danish coast.

In Britain three people were found dead in the flood-ravaged area around the city of Carlisle in northwest England, where one of the worst storms for decades brought flooding and high winds, police said. At least 11 people were reported dead in Denmark and Sweden after the storms, which left 405,000 households without power, disrupted road and rail traffic and caused heavy damage.

In Carlisle, some people had to be rescued by helicopter from the roof of their houses surrounded by floodwater and cars were seen floating down streets.

The bodies of two elderly women were found in homes in Carlisle, while a 63-year-old man was killed when a barn blew down in an area towards the Scottish border. Fifteen families had to be airlifted to safety while thousands of other people left their homes on their own initiative, police said.

One resident, Alan Hargraves, 45, told of how he had to throw his front door keys to a man in a rescue boat so they could open the door and get him out. "Water started seeping up through the carpets and coming in through the air vents," he said. At one point the water rose to about four feet (1.2 metres) high. "Things were just floating round the house.

The fridge had toppled over and bags of vegetables were floating round the kitchen." Emergency services were still looking for two people carried away by floodwater, one by the river Aire at Apperley Bridge near Bradford and another near Forres in Scotland. In southern Sweden, four motorists were killed when uprooted trees fell on their cars. A fifth was killed by a passing car when he tried to remove a fallen tree from a road, and another man sustained fatal injuries on his farm when bales of hay came crashing down on him during the storm.

Yet another man fell to his death from the roof of his home as tried to secure tiles, media reported.

In Denmark, police said two motorists died when trees tumbled onto their cars. Two other people were killed when they were hit by a roof that blew off a building in nearby Assens. Winds in western Denmark reached speeds of up to 151 kilometers (94 miles) an hour when the storm hit on Saturday, the Danish DMI meteorological service said. Many homes were left without power.

In Sweden alone, some 405,000 households were left without electricity, primarily in the southern and western parts of the country. By late Sunday afternoon, almost 24 hours after the storm hit, some 317,000 were still without power. Due to sustained heavy winds and the risk of falling trees, repair work on the lines was slow to get started and some customers could be without power for up to a week, one power company, Sydkraft, warned.

Another 250,000 homes were without fixed telephone lines, mostly in western and southern Sweden, as base stations lost power and crews were unable to reach emergency generators because of the storm. The storm also lashed northern Germany, where police divers were searching for two boating enthusiasts who went missing after their kayak overturned.

In Russia authorities in Saint Petersburg closed off embankments to traffic and shut six subway stations as high water levels threatened the former imperial capital with flooding.

Several regions of northern Poland were also hit by high winds. Latvia's government declared an electricity crisis after hurricane-strength winds ripped roofs off many homes and left more than half of the country without power.

And more than 100 people were evacuated from coastal towns in western Estonia as the storms hit regions on the Baltic Sea causing flooding. All train traffic in southern Sweden was suspended, and car and train traffic on the Oeresund bridge linking Copenhagen to southern Sweden was also stopped because of the storm. "There are uprooted trees in several places, rooftiles blown onto the tracks near Helsingborg (in southern Sweden)... It's chaos right now," Mattias Hennius, a spokesman for the Swedish rail authority Banverket told the Swedish news agency TT.

Dozens of ferry routes to and from Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Britain and Germany were cancelled, while the Swedish coast guard reported that numerous vessels had anchored in the southern Baltic to seek shelter from the storm. Around the British Isles, trucks toppled over, river banks burst, people were evacuated from flooded houses and uprooted trees blocked dozens of roads. About a dozen trucks overturned on a motorway in northwest England, several roads were blocked because of flooding and trees falling.

"It's probably one of the most severe (storms) we've seen since the storm of 1987," said a spokesman for the British Meteorological Office, Andy Bodenham.
© AFP 2004