Monday, Januari 26, 2009

Klaus

In response to many questions from our friends in Wales and the Netherlands hereby a good summary of the past days. Friday and Saturday, an extremely violent storm (Klaus) on South-west France and parts of Spain and Germany pulled. Wind speeds of 180 km/hour were measured. In France, there are currently six deaths as a result of the storm, three in Les Landes, one in the Gironde and two in the Dordogne. In Spain, there are at least 17 dead persons and wounded.

At present, more than 10,000 aid workers (military, firefighters, employees of EDF (electricity company in France) and France Telecom) make a tally of the damage and restore the problems. The "Les Landes" forest (which has hardly recovered from the heavy storm in 1999) has been destroyed for 30%. 800,000 families are still without electricity and 300,000 without phone. Many French have electrical heating and for those families the failure of electricity is a major problem. As a result four dead persons (a couple in the Dordogne and a couple in Port-Barcarès) by carbon monoxide poisoning as people re-use their old heating system. In Tarn-et-Garonne 18 people have suffered a carbon monoxide poisoning for the same reasons. Today many schools remain closed because several departments are threatened by floods. The expectation is that the rains continue. Many families have to prepare for nights without heating, leaky roofs, blocked roads and no telephone (no telephone also means no INTERNET!).

Meteo France gives warnings in the form of codes (Consultez la carte de vigilance '), code orange and red were on Friday and Saturday in many parts of south-west France, also with us. With weather extremes, the first thing you should do in France, is to close all windows, doors and shutters, if your house is equiped with these items, but surely almost every French home is equiped with this, not only as protection against storms, but also against extreme cold and heat. We have closed op for two days and lived in almost complete darkness with the howling of the wind outside. From Saturday to Sunday night, I have slept in the rooms of the children on the other side of the house because I was afraid that the trees behind the house might fall on the roof.

Yesterday after two days of hell and damnation, the clouds were gone. No more rain and we sat under a blue, cloud-free sky to drink our coffee, but today 's weather is like so often lately: gray.

Link: Pictures of the bad weather on the website of the Figaro.

posted by Ruud at 12:00  |  send a comment

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