Storms claim another life in UK

LONDON: UK police said a falling tree killed a man in England after record winds brought by Storm Goretti, and nearly 40,000 homes in France were still without power Saturday.

Some 15 people have died in weather-related accidents this week across Europe as gale-force winds and storms caused travel mayhem, shut schools, and cut power to hundreds of thousands in freezing temperatures.

The storm barrelled through southwestern Cornwall and parts of Wales overnight Thursday to Friday. Gusts of up to 160 kilometres per hour (100 miles per hour) felled trees and left tens of thousands of homes without power.

A man was found dead in the town of Helston in Cornwall on Friday after a tree fell onto a caravan, Devon and Cornwall police said in a statement.

Most of the UK remains under a weather warning for snow and ice on Saturday, the Met Office national weather agency said. It warned that black ice could cause "disruption" in Scotland and northern England.

Heavy snowfall followed by the storm meant that some 250 schools in Scotland were closed for much of the first week back after the Christmas break.

Around 28,000 homes were still without power at the start of the weekend in southwestern England and the Midlands, according to the network operator National Grid.

Storm Goretti also ploughed through other parts of northern Europe, with at its peak some 380,000 homes in France without power.

But by 6:00 pm local time (1700 GMT), the number of households in the dark was just under 40,000, according to the country's grid operator.

In northern Germany, long-distance rail traffic slowly resumed on Saturday, having been completely suspended on Friday due to another storm named Elli, Deutsche Bahn said.

In the far north of the country, the port city of Hamburg, where large amounts of snow fell, remained particularly disrupted, it added.

A number of rail services will still not be restored on Saturday, notably those linking Hamburg to Copenhagen, Amsterdam and Hanover.

Services from Hamburg to the western Ruhr region or to Berlin are expected to be restored over the course of Saturday, it said.