France, Spain pick up pieces after deadly storm
PARIS/MADRID (Reuters) - European countries sent electricians and electrical engineers to France on Sunday, and Spain deployed extra troops to help deal with the aftermath of a storm that killed 15 people in southwest France and northern Spain.
With Saturday's winds of up to 190 km (118 miles) an hour gone, the sun rose over a chaotic landscape of fallen trees and pylons, destroyed roofs, crushed cars and scattered debris.
The weekend was also deadly in the French Alps, where five people died in three separate avalanches, police said. Three were young people who were skiing outside the authorised slopes, two were a couple in their fifties on a snow shoe excursion.
The Spanish Defence Ministry said the army had stepped up support to firemen fighting a forest fire in La Nucia, north of the resort town of Benidorm in Alicante province, that started when gales felled an electricity pylon on Saturday.
Thousands of people in the area were evacuated from their homes and spent the night in libraries and sports centres.
More than 1,000 French electricians, backed up by 12 helicopters surveying the damage, struggled to restore power to 1.1 million homes. Colleagues from Britain, Germany and Portugal were due to arrive to help out.
"Access to the network is particularly difficult, complicating the work of our teams," said the French grid manager Electricite Reseau Distribution France (ERDF).
The storm killed 11 people in Spain -- including four children who were killed when a sports centre collapsed -- and four in France, where it was the worst since December 1999.
Then, a storm had killed 88 people in France. After that, the weather forecast agency had set up an early warning system that authorities said had helped keep the death toll low.
"I am satisfied that the lessons of 1999 were learnt," said President Nicolas Sarkozy during a visit to the area. He asked the army to help bring the situation back to normal.
RAVAGED FOREST
The toll for the Landes forest, one of Europe's largest which provides a living for thousands of small and large timber companies, was dramatic.
Footage filmed from helicopters and broadcast on France 2 state television showed vast areas where there were more trees lying on the ground than standing. Experts estimated that 50 percent or more of the trees had fallen.
"All forest officers are unhappy today, but they are on the ground, working to repair the damage," Pierre-Olivier Drege, head of the French forestry commission, told France Info radio.
In Spain, the electricity network operator REE said gales had disrupted 17 lines in the north. Tens of thousands of people in the Galicia and Catalonia regions were without power.
France Telecom said telephone lines to 350,000 homes were down and it had mobilised 1,000 technicians to try and restore the network, which was disrupted by power cuts.
The French state railway operator SNCF said it too had 1,000 engineers and workers on the ground, removing trees from the tracks and fixing overhead electric cables.
Bordeaux, Toulouse and Perpignan airports had reopened and train traffic was back to normal between Paris and Bordeaux but Paris-Toulouse traffic was still disrupted and almost all regional and local railway lines were closed, SNCF said.
"More than 400 level crossings are out of order for lack of power supply ... We advise travellers to postpone their trips on these lines," it said in a statement.
Hundreds of rail passengers who were stranded on Saturday when the storm hit were given emergency shelter overnight in municipal buildings normally used for parties.
Spanish train operator Renfe said all trains were running normally except those that cross the Spanish/French border.
(Additional reporting by Claude Canellas in Bordeaux, Alexis de La Fontaine in Lyon, writing by Estelle Shirbon, editing by Katie Nguyen)