January 19, 2007
Deadly Wind and Rain Storm Sweeps Europe
By MARK LANDLER

FRANKFURT, Jan. 18 — A howling gale churned through the British Isles and Northern Europe on Thursday, killing at least nine people, uprooting trees, shattering windows, flooding beaches and forcing the cancellation of hundreds of flights at airports from London to Frankfurt.

The storm, called Kyrill by German meteorologists, generated pelting rain in Britain, Ireland, France, Belgium and the Netherlands. The fierce weather hampered efforts to rescue 26 sailors from a container ship they abandoned Thursday after it began listing in the English Channel.

It also prompted Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to cut short a visit to Berlin, where she conferred with Chancellor Angela Merkel about the Middle East. Ms. Rice left an hour early for London to beat the weather; her plane made a bumpy landing there amid winds gusting to 80 miles per hour.

“This is the worst storm since 2002,” said Burkhard Kirsch, a meteorologist at the German Weather Service, noting that a gust of 123 m.p.h. had been recorded in the mountains of central Germany.

The name Kyrill stems from a German practice of naming weather systems. Anyone may name one, for a fee. Naming a high-pressure system costs $385, while low-pressure systems, which are more common, go for $256. Three siblings paid to name this system as a 65th birthday gift for their father, not knowing that it would grow into a fierce storm.

“We hope ourselves that we’ll get out of it lightly,” Rumen Genow, one of the three, told a northern German newspaper on Thursday.

In Britain, three motorists were killed in storm-related accidents, Reuters reported, while a woman died when a wall collapsed on her in heavy winds. Two people were killed in the Netherlands after an uprooted tree crushed their car, the Dutch news agency ANP reported. In Germany, two people, one of them 18 months old, were killed by flying debris. A motorist was killed when he crashed his car into another car while swerving to avoid a fallen tree, the police said. At nightfall, with the storm bearing down on Germany, the national railway suspended all long-distance service. At Heathrow Airport, outside London, airlines canceled 123 flights, while in Frankfurt, 122 flights were canceled.

“The wind conditions are not preventing the planes from taking off or landing, but the air traffic control authorities have increased the separation between the aircraft for safety reasons,” said Robert A. Payne, a spokesman for Fraport, which operates the Frankfurt airport.

French and British helicopters were sent to rescue 26 sailors in a lifeboat off southwestern England. They had abandoned their container ship, the MSC Napoli, after it was damaged and lost power, Bloomberg reported.

Two British Navy helicopters saved the sailors, but the fate of the ship was unclear. At Rotterdam, a container ship slipped its moorings and struck an oil jetty, leaking 10,000 barrels of fuel, Dutch news reports said.

Thom Shanker contributed reporting from London.

---

Burkhard Kirsch? I would like to find him and give him a hug on the premise of us being very distant relatives, but relatives all the same! I wonder who our common ancestor is?