Strong winter storm paralyses travel across Ireland, UK, and France

A powerful winter storm swept across northwest Europe on Saturday, causing widespread travel chaos and resulting in at least one death.

Hampshire Police in southern England said a man died after a tree fell onto a car on a major road near Winchester while authorities in West Yorkshire said that they were investigating a potential link between a second death in a traffic accident and the storm.

However, the road involved was not icy at the time.

In Ireland, Storm Bert left over 60,000 properties without power, while also disrupting ferry and train routes across the Irish Sea. 

Major transport hubs in Britain faced significant delays, with airports and Channel ports severely impacted.

Meanwhile, in France, tens of thousands remained without electricity following Storm Caetano earlier in the week, leading to hundreds of passengers being stranded as train services were halted due to power outages.

Media footage showed flooding in the west of Ireland, which also caused rail closures in Northern Ireland. Snow impacted travel across Britain.

The heaviest snow hit Scotland and parts of northern and central England, with dozens of flood alerts in place.

The United Kingdom’s Met Office issued snow and ice warnings for those regions, saying there was a “good chance some rural communities could be cut off”.

Scottish hills could see up to 40 centimetres of snow, while winds approaching 113 kilometres per hour were recorded in Britain.

Ferry operator DFDS cancelled services on some routes until Monday, with sailings from Newhaven and Dover in southern England to Dieppe and Calais in France severely affected.

Flights were disrupted at Newcastle airport due to heavy snow, with some flights diverted to Belfast and Edinburgh.

Blackouts blanket northwest Europe

In Britain, the National Grid operator said power had been restored to “many homes and businesses” but more than 4,000 properties across the country were still without electricity on Saturday — the majority in southwest England.

Some 47,000 homes remained without power in northern France on Saturday, two days after the country was battered by Storm Caetano, power company Enedis said.

Up to 270,000 people had been cut off due to the storm but Enedis said it had 2,000 technicians working to reconnect electricity lines torn down by winds of up to 130kph.

Several hundred passengers were stranded on two trains in western France halted by power cuts.

Some 200 people on a train going from Hendaye to Bordeaux and 400 on high-speed TGV going from Hendaye to Paris spent up to nine hours in the carriages.

Junior transport minister Francois Dourovray told RTL radio that up to 1,000 passengers on different trains were affected by the power cut.