Storms: Millions of Europeans Without Power
AFP is reporting “Windstorms batter France, Britain on flood alert“, and highlights that
Hurricane-force gusts of up to 140 kilometres (87 miles) per hour battered France’s west coast late Monday as the second major storm in two weeks barrelled in from the Atlantic.
Bracing for severe winds, authorities shut down Charles de Gaulle and Orly airports overnight for the first time in 34 years, cancelling more than 200 flights.
The storm left some 900,000 homes without electricity late Monday and by midday Tuesday 400,000 households were still without power in central, eastern and northern France, the grid operator ERDF said.
Meanwhile, across the Channel,
By 1400 GMT there were 276 flood warnings in place in England and Wales, including one severe flood warning in the Anglian region of eastern England, according to Britain’s environment agency.
London’s Thames Barrier was also closed to protect the British capital from a rising tide, and was expected to remain shut for most of the day, the agency said.
Up to 3,000 homes were left without electricity in parts of western England as a band of snow stretched from south Wales into the Midlands.
Bristol airport in southwest England was closed overnight because of heavy snowfall, with eight outbound flights and several inbound flights cancelled or diverted to other airports.
Two “one in a hundred year” storms have hit France in the last two weeks, mid last year a hurricane hit Germany for the first time ever. Two years or so ago a tornado hit the suburbs of London.
Meanwhile “one in a thousand year” storms, flooding and king-tides have hit the UK three times in the last five years. Down-under, at least 4 towns now, and an area covering hundreds of thousands of hectares have been wiped off the map, hundreds of lives brought to a screaming halt in Australia’s most ferocious, most lethal bushfires ever.
In the wake of the Australian bushfires’ ferocity the head of the NSW Fire Brigade, Mr Greg Mullins, said: “We can’t be the safety net all the time. Our resources are stretched and we won’t be there.”
In an interview in the Sydney Morning Herald yesterday, Mr Mullins made it clear, “Don’t expect us to save you.”
“If this is the way of the future – savage winds, high temperatures and low humidity – it is clear it is going to get worse and it is going to take all levels of the community and government and agencies to work together,” he said.
Firefighters’ two biggest enemies are complacency and a lack of knowledge in the community but, as fires become bigger and more destructive through the effects of climate change, people must become more self-sufficient, he said.
In Europe and Australia, and most of the world in fact, at the very least building codes are going to have to be upgraded in the light of the very real changes to the climate we’ve witnessed; and changes we know are to come, regardless of any emissions reduction targets we might hit. Speaking of reduction targets, in the wake of what amounts to a pattern of global climactic destabilisation the world needs to step-up and commit to much more serious targets than the ones currently on the table.
The urgency of the climate crisis could not be starker, or more immediate. Delay, denial and delusion has to be measured in human lives. — DS