AT LEAST TEN people have been killed in western Europe as Storm Ciarán brought winds of up to 200 kilometres per hour.
Three people have died in Italy, two in Belgium, two in France, and one each in the Netherlands, Spain and Germany, according to local authorities.
In Ireland, Status Yellow warnings for rainfall across Cork, Carlow, Kilkenny, Waterford, Wexford, and Wicklow were lifted at 7am yesterday morning after Storm Ciarán crossed over the south coast overnight.
Three people died in Tuscany, Italy, where a state of emergency was declared due to the storm.
In Ghent, Belgium, a five-year-old Ukrainian boy and a 64-year-old woman were killed by falling tree branches.
Earlier, falling trees killed a lorry driver in his vehicle in northern France. In the city of Le Havre, another man died after falling from his balcony.
The three other reported deaths were a man in Venray, the Netherlands; a woman in Madrid; and a person in Germany.
Rail, air and ferry travel were disrupted yesterday in several major European cities, while in France, around 1.2 million homes lost electricity.
French President Emmanuel Macron is due to visit the region of Brittany, which was heavily lashed by the storm, today. French weather service Meteo-France wrote on X (formerly known as Twitter) that winds in Brittany were “exceptional” and “many absolute records have been broken”.
In Italy, Eugenio Giani, the governor of Tuscany, where three people died, wrote on X: “What happened tonight in Tuscany has a name: climate change.”
Storms and associated risks like flooding are expected to become more frequent and more intense as climate change wrecks havoc on weather systems.
For Ireland, the Climate Action Plan 2023 outlined that the “most immediate risks to Ireland from climate change are predominantly those associated with changes in extremes, such as floods, droughts, and storms”.
Additional reporting by AFP
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