Storms Boelo and Osten leave more than 150,000 homes without power in Northern Europe and disrupt air travel

Storms leave hundreds of thousands of homes without power

Storms Boelo and Osten, which swept across Northern Europe within a day of each other, on Sunday left more than 150,000 homes without electricity, forced the cancellation of hundreds of flights and disrupted telephone networks. According to the authorities, more than 82,000 homes in Britain, almost 60,000 in France and at least 10,000 in Germany were affected by the outages (AFP). Wind gusts of up to 135 km/h (84 mph) were recorded in the Argyll and Bute area of western Scotland; fallen trees and downed cables blocked roads and railways across the country.

The scale of the impact by country

The UK's Energy Networks Association said that at one point during the storms more than 400,000 homes lost electricity. In France, according to the power company Enedis, about 288,000 homes were without power at the peak of Storm Osten on Saturday; by midday Sunday about 59,000 remained, mostly in Normandy and Brittany. 2,600 Enedis technicians and contractors were deployed to restore the power supply. In Germany, Osten cut power to 10,000 homes in and around Freiburg im Breisgau on Sunday; the city's main hospital restricted admissions to emergency cases due to an outage that also affected the mobile network. On Friday, Storm Osten tore part of the pier in Brighton, on England's south coast, into the sea; the pier section had not been in use since a 2003 fire.

Casualties and transport chaos

On Saturday in the German town of Nastätten, two people were seriously injured when Storm Osten's wind tore scaffolding loose at an autumn fair, police said. Germany's weather service DWD forecast new gusts of up to 100 km/h on the northern coast for Sunday. The storms also hit the Netherlands and Belgium: in Brussels on Saturday, falling trees injured four people. Because of the bad weather, hundreds of flights across Northern Europe were cancelled or diverted. Amsterdam's Schiphol, one of Europe's largest hubs, cancelled dozens of flights on Sunday: according to AFP's count on the airport's website, there were about 90 cancelled departures, mostly to European cities including Paris, Rome and Dublin; dozens of arriving flights were also cancelled. Flights in northern England and Scotland were also affected. The agency notes that experts warn of more frequent extreme weather events due to global warming; these are the first major autumn storms in Europe this year.

Why it matters

Within a single day, the storms knocked out power systems in three countries at once — according to the Energy Networks Association, more than 400,000 homes in total were temporarily left without power, and the Freiburg hospital was forced to operate on an emergency-only basis. This directly affects hundreds of thousands of households and travellers: hundreds of cancelled flights at Schiphol and in northern Britain mean that restoring power supplies and flight schedules will take time even after the storms weaken. It is not yet known when electricity will return to all of the roughly 150,000 homes still without it that the authorities reported on Sunday.