Storm kills two, cuts out electricity in the Nordics

Thousands of homes across Scandinavia were left without power, transport was disrupted and at least two people died after a weather system known as Storm Johannes swept across Sweden, Finland and Norway, bringing down trees and power lines.

Close to hurricane-force winds were recorded, and off the coast of Finland, seven-meter-high waves were reported by the Helsinki Times, as the extreme weather caused chaos for thousands of people.

Kjell Lund, duty meteorologist at the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute, or SMHI, told the Nordics Today website that in the Vasterbotten mountains region, wind speeds of "41 meters per second in the gusts (had been recorded), so it's a storm with hurricane-force gusts".

In the central Swedish town of Sandviken, a man died in hospital after being hit by a falling tree branch, and further north, a utility company reported that one of its workers died "in the field", in what is believed to have been another falling tree incident.

Orange alerts, the second-highest level of public warning, were issued over the extreme conditions, and Erik Kjellstrom, a climate scientist at SMHI, said they should be taken seriously.

"The combination of wind and snow is particularly hazardous," he said. "It leads to snow drift, which can block roads and railways in a matter of hours, and it greatly increases the risk of accidents for anyone caught outside."

Remarkably, there were no injuries when high winds blew two planes off a runway and into a snowbank at Kittila Airport in Northern Finland, and dangerous sea conditions also saw the cancellation of many ferry and cruise journeys.

Norwegian broadcaster NRK said emergency services had to attend to hundreds of weather-related incidents, pushing their resources to the limit, with widespread power outages reported across the country, similar to what happened in Finland and Sweden. These could take days to repair, and raise questions about the resilience of national energy supply networks.

Public broadcasting network NRK reported "total chaos" at the airport at Tromso, the popular tourist city known as the Gateway to the Arctic, which is particularly busy at this time of year.

At the other extreme of Europe, weather conditions are thought to have been a factor in another fatal incident, after four hikers died in an avalanche in the Vardousia Mountains in central Greece.

The bodies of three men and a woman were found partially covered by snow near the top of the range's highest peak, Korakas. Local authorities said that they began their ascent in good conditions, but the difficult terrain and rapidly deteriorating weather made for a tragic end to the Christmas Day walk, with the alarm being raised by friends when they did not return as expected.

The poor climate conditions not only made it difficult for the hikers, but also for the emergency services attempting to locate them, because even a helicopter and drones deployed in the region struggled to be of help.

julian@mail.chinadailyuk.com