More than 50 dead as violent storm hits Europe

Published: 7:00AM GMT 01 March 2010

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President Nicolas Sarkozy was to revisit France"s storm-battered Atlantic seashore where a little 45 people were killed in flooding and aroused winds.

Dubbed Xynthia, the Atlantic charge crashed opposite the horse opera coasts of France and Spain, bringing with it a rope of tainted continue stretching from Portugal to the Netherlands and internal as far as Germany.

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The bulk of the casualties were in France, where gusts of 93 mph and twenty-six feet waves smashed the west coast, causing flooding internal and promulgation residents scurrying onto rooftops.

Prime Minister Francois Fillon pronounced France would rigourously acknowledgement the charge a healthy disaster, pardon up supports to assistance communities rebuild, as Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux put the inhabitant genocide fee at "between 45 and 50".

France was to ask the European Union to recover supports from the informal bill in sequence to assistance compensate for liberation operations.

"We were warned, but I didn"t think it could do this," pronounced 62-year-old retirement Jean-Francois Dikczyk, who saw the sea surge multiform hundred yards internal and pound though the windows of his house.

"My mom was scarcely killed. She"s 83 and disabled. She was sleeping on the belligerent floor, and her mattress was floating. My son and I managed to get her upstairs, but it was unequivocally catastrophic," he said.

President Sarkozy voiced his condolences to the family groups of the victims and praised the work of rescuers.

Emergency services plucked family groups from rooftops with helicopters and rescue launches, and hundreds of refugees sought proxy accommodation.

Shortly after 5:00 pm (1600 GMT) Sunday state forecaster Meteo France pronounced the charge had upheld in to Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands, and there were reports of high winds in the Swiss Alps.

In Germany, a engineer in the Black Forest, a womanlike jogger in the horse opera locale of Bergheim and a man on foot in a timberland west of Frankfurt were all killed by descending trees.

In Spain, informal authorities pronounced Sunday that dual men elderly 51 and 41 died when their car was strike by a descending tree. An 82-year-old lady was killed Saturday when a wall collapsed in the Galicia region.

Portugal pronounced Saturday that a 10-year-old child was killed by a descending bend and inundate waters one after another to climb on Sunday.

A man in his sixties was killed by a descending tree in Belgium, and puncture services were called out regularly to understanding with depressed energy lines.