Fierce Storm Batters Southern England, Continent, Killing 62

A fierce storm with torrential rains driven by winds of up to 110 m.p.h. cut a trail of destruction Thursday across southern England and into the Continent, killing at least 62 people in five countries.

The casualty figure was highest in Britain, where police said 39 people died. Elsewhere, authorities reported 11 killed in the Netherlands, six in France, five in Belgium and one in West Germany.

Lashing rain smashed windows in central London, tore off roofs and knocked down scaffolding and billboards. Pedestrians clung to one another to keep their ground. Electricity went off for 250,000 people in western England.

The death toll was much higher than in October, 1987, when Britain’s most destructive storm in centuries killed 17 people.

Only one British Rail station in London was open Thursday afternoon, and subway service was disrupted by fallen tree limbs on surface sections.

Some highways, including the six-lane M-25 freeway circling the capital, were blocked by overturned trucks.

Several people were killed when tree limbs crashed onto them or their cars. Two children died when parts of their schools collapsed, and two men restoring a 17th-Century house were killed by wind-blown scaffolding.

A man was lost overboard from the Liberian-registered freighter Serica about 200 miles off southwest Britain.

Ferry service across the English Channel was suspended, and it was disrupted between Scotland and Northern Ireland, the Coast Guard said.

“These are the worst weather conditions I have ever seen in well over 20 years of service,” said Capt. James Martin, skipper of the channel ferry Pride of Kent. “The conditions out here are atrocious.”

The Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, which lost thousands of fine old trees to the hurricane-force winds of October, 1987, lost 100 on Thursday.

In France, where six people were reported killed, the victims included a 12-year-old girl crushed when wind blew down a wall in a school courtyard. Dozens of people were reported injured along France’s northern coast, and hundreds of thousands were left without power.

A reactor chimney was blown down at the Paluel nuclear-power plant in France. State-owned Electricite de France said the plant was shut down immediately and that any possible hazards would be monitored.

In the Netherlands, one of those killed was a man blown away by winds while trying to secure his windmill. Dozens of cars were crushed by falling trees. The Dutch coast guard reported a Soviet fishing vessel with 56 people aboard in trouble off the north coast.

Among the five people killed in Belgium were a woman and her child who died near Brussels when a tree crashed on their car.