Storm Dennis: one dead in the UK, 45,000 homes without electricity in France
Storm Dennis, which swept through the UK on Sunday, killed a man who fell in the Tawe River in south Wales on red alert, and hundreds of planes were grounded.
In France, nearly 45,000 homes were still without electricity Sunday evening in the northwest of the country after the storm that disrupted rail traffic.
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A record has been set in England with the “highest number of ongoing flood warnings and warnings ever recorded,” said a director of the Environmental Agency (EA) in a tweet, counting 594 in a area from the south of Scotland to Cornwall (south-west of England).
The British Meteorological Institute (MET) issued a red alert on Sunday in south Wales due to heavy rains linked to Dennis – a first for rains since December 2015.
This highest level of alert is equivalent to “dangerous weather conditions” presenting “a danger of death”, risks of disruption in energy supply and damage to infrastructure.
“We urge people to be careful and make arrangements to be safe,” said Jeremy Parr, the flood risk management officer for the Welsh government body responsible for natural resources.
Several hundred flights to and from the whole of the United Kingdom are grounded, announced the British Airways and EasyJet companies.
Train traffic has also been suspended in South Wales due to the presence of water on the tracks.
In the same region, the city of Aberdaron suffered winds of more than 145 km / h and, at the Cray Reservoir dam, 132.8 mm of rain fell between Saturday morning 7:00 am and Sunday morning 8:00 am. The equivalent of more than a month of local precipitation (110.8 mm on average in February), explained the MET on its website.
At the start of the storm on Saturday, two bodies were recovered from the south coast of England in rough seas. The circumstances under which these deaths occurred remain to be established.
Brighton police said they were actively looking for a woman in her 20s who was spotted entering the water around 2:45 a.m.
The Ministry of Defense deployed the army to West Yorkshire, an area in the north of England hard hit the previous weekend by the floods caused by the storm Ciara.
Several sports competitions scheduled for Sunday, including the Women’s FA Cup, rugby matches and horse races, have been canceled.
“The storm is set to continue and the water is expected to reach its maximum on Monday and Tuesday,” said the British Red Cross, asking “people to be ready as if the worst is to happen.”
In France, the 700 passengers of a high-speed train between Nantes (west) and Paris, blocked by a tree fallen on the tracks, were to be transhipped in the night from Sunday to Monday. Another TGV also left from Nantes bound for Lille (north) and Strasbourg (east) immobilized him due to a lack of electrical supply linked to the storm.
