Millions of people in southwest France and northern Spain struggled yesterday with destroyed roofs, fallen trees, power cuts and phone outages in the aftermath of a storm that killed 15 people.
Saturday's winds of up to 190 kilometres an hour, which killed 11 people in Spain and four in France as trees crashed onto roads and walls collapsed, faded yesterday but the death toll rose again.
An elderly French couple with no power in their house in the Dordogne area died, poisoned by carbon monoxide from their back-up generator, authorities said, adding that 30 others were in hospital after being poisoned in similar circumstances.
The weekend was also deadly in the French Alps, where five people died in three separate avalanches, police said. Three were young people who were skiing outside the authorised slopes, two were a couple in their fifties on a snow shoe excursion.
In the southwest, French electrical engineers, backed up by colleagues from Britain, Germany and Portugal and by 12 helicopters, struggled to restore power to 1.7 million homes that were cut off from the grid during the storm.
By nightfall yesterday, they had reconnected 700,000 homes but the grid manager warned it could take several days to restore power to the 800,000 others still in the dark.
It was the worst storm in France since December 1999, when a huge storm killed 88 people. After that, the weather forecast agency had set up an early warning system that helped keep the death toll relatively low on Saturday as people stayed indoors.
"I am satisfied that the lessons of 1999 were learnt," said President Nicolas Sarkozy during a visit to the affected area.
Mr Sarkozy said the army would help thousands of workers from the electricity, phone, water and railway companies struggling to restore battered infrastructure.
In the town of Muret, south of Toulouse, residents were aghast at the scale of the devastation. The secondary school there, the biggest in the Midi-Pyrenees region with 2,100 pupils, had its roof ripped off and was a scene of chaos.
"Everything was flying everywhere, it was astonishing," the school principal Amedee Collin said.