People in southwest France and northern Spain struggled today with destroyed roofs, fallen trees, power cuts and phone outages in the aftermath of the violent storm.
Yesterday’s winds of up to 190km/h, which killed 11 people in Spain and four in France as trees crashed onto roads and walls collapsed, faded today but the death toll rose again.
An elderly French couple with no power in their house in the Dordogne area died, poisoned by carbon monoxide from their back-up generator, authorities said, adding that 30 others were in hospital after being poisoned in similar circumstances.
The weekend was also deadly in the French Alps, where five people died in three separate avalanches, police said.
In the southwest, French electrical engineers, backed up by colleagues from Britain, Germany and Portugal and by 12 helicopters, struggled to restore power to 1.7 million homes that were cut off from the grid during the storm.
It was the worst storm in France since December 1999, when a huge storm killed 88 people.
After that, the weather forecast agency had set up an early warning system that helped keep the death toll relatively low yesterday as people stayed indoors.
President Sarkozy visited the affected area today and said he was satisfied that the lessons of 1999 were learned.
Mr Sarkozy said the army would help thousands of workers from the electricity, phone, water and railway companies struggling to restore battered infrastructure.
In Spain, troops helped emergency services fight a forest fire in La Nucia, north of Benidorm in Alicante province, and by evening it was nearly under control, local authorities said.
