Freak storms packing howling winds and heavy rain that lashed Britain and France this week were set to continue on Wednesday, after already causing significant destruction and the deaths of at least four people.
Rescuers in southern France resumed searches for at least five swimmers caught by surprise by the sudden change in the weather that occurred on Tuesday, roiling waters into huge waves and pushing out powerful gusts of up to 80kph.
The four people confirmed killed — a 41-year-old woman on vacation with her family, a 46-year-old man, another man and an unidentified girl — drowned as they swam off separate beaches and in a river.
In Britain, residents of Boscastle, a coastal village in north Cornwall, were bracing for more rain two days after flash floods sent a wall of water tearing through the place, collapsing buildings and sweeping more than 50 automobiles into the sea.
Although no deaths were reported from the Boscastle disaster, police continued to search for more than a dozen people who remained unaccounted for.
In western Switzerland, the storms caused property damage but no casualties, according to police. Fallen trees crushed one building, and several houses had their roofs ripped off, while flooding swamped at least eight villages.
Weather forecasts said France could expect more storms later on Wednesday, some of them containing hail and very strong winds. In Britain, torrential rain with thunder was expected.
The dark clouds and precipitation were to expand to include virtually all of Europe except Greece, Italy and Spain, and would remain, albeit with lesser violence, until the end of the week.
The European Environment Agency (EEA), a European Union-wide network of environmental data collection, said in a new report on global warming caused by greenhouse gases that in the future there will be ”more frequent and more economically costly storms, floods, droughts and other extreme weather”.
The head of the EEA, Jacqueline McGlade, said Europe has to continue to reduce the causes of climate change.
”This is a phenomenon that will considerably affect our societies and environments for decades and centuries to come,” she said.
In Britain and France, media took stock of the decidedly un-summer assault unleashed by nature.
”When, suddenly, the weather goes crazy,” the French daily Le Parisien headlined.
”Peril increases as world gets hotter,” Britain’s The Times newspaper said. ”Rains, rivers and ruin,” one of its rivals, The Guardian, wrote.
France suffered the worst in terms of lives lost because the storm front hit abruptly at the peak of the August vacation season, when beach and river resorts are full of holidaymakers keen to cool off by swimming.
At least three of the four confirmed dead were French nationals who drowned on beaches near the southwestern port city of Montpellier. The 46-year-old man died when big waves threw him against rocks.
The fourth — the unidentified girl — was found early on Wednesday on the banks of the Beaume River by two walkers.
It was not immediately confirmed whether the body was that of a girl who was swept away 7km upstream on Tuesday as she was swimming with her boyfriend, who managed to hold on to a rock until he was rescued.
Other searches have been mounted for two boys, aged 12 and 18, and two other swimmers who disappeared while swimming off beaches near Montpellier, and for a man in his twenties who was bathing in a river near Marseille. — Sapa-AFP