After torrential rain caused flash flooding in southern England and a landslide in Scotland this week, meteorologists on Thursday forecast more heavy downpours and urged people to heed bad weather warnings.
In France, meanwhile, nine people died in violent storms overnight and Wednesday, and fears of falling trees forced Paris to close its parks and cemeteries.
British military helicopters rescued 57 people stranded in vehicles on Wednesday after two landslides near a lake in the Scottish highlands following persistent torrential rain.
Flight Lieutenant Fay Potton, from the Royal Air Force in Kinloss, said storms were so severe overnight that one rescue helicopter was forced to wait until morning to return to base.
“There was terrible thunder overnight and heavy, heavy showers,” Potton told Reuters, adding air crews would be keeping a particularly close eye on the weather.
Nobody was injured in the landslides or the rescue.
Flood tied to Hurricane Bonnie
The Meteorological Office said Wednesday’s landslide and flash flooding in the tiny southern fishing village of Boscastle on Monday were caused by different weather, but the heavy rain came from the same patch of low pressure.
“Essentially it is the same system that was the air mass that was Hurricane Bonnie. It was no longer Hurricane Bonnie when it came over but it had plenty of energy in it,” said Met Office spokesman Dominic Woollatt.
Low pressure combined with “freak circumstances” caused torrents of water to tear through Boscastle on the southwest coast, he said.
More heavy rain is forecast for Britain’s southwest and emergency services are scrambling to clear up around Boscastle.
Authorities said they did not believe anyone had died in the flooding, which swept cars out to sea and forced residents to take refuge in trees. But a spokeswoman for North Cornwall District Council said on Thursday searches were continuing and casualties could not yet be ruled out.
The Met Office is urging people to heed weather warnings in coming days as more air comes in from the Atlantic Ocean heavy with water, in what could be a record-breaking month of rain.
“We’ve got the remnants of Hurricane Danielle for next week,” said Woollatt. “We’ll be seeing thunderstorms and heavy rain around the country... I’m sure the new front will give us similar problems because of the amount of rain it will contain.”
“If areas are liable to flood, then get the sandbags ready.”
French tragedies
In France, rescue services backed up by helicopters searched for three more missing people amid complaints that holiday-makers had ignored red warning flags alerting them to the dangers of heavy seas, flooding and gale-force winds.
“The recklessness of some swimmers and the foolhardiness of others has resulted in a dramatic death toll,” said Eric Soupra, spokesman for the Interior Ministry’s civil emergencies service.
Around a quarter of metropolitan France’s administrative districts were affected by the bad weather.
Some 1,000 people were evacuated overnight from a campsite in the southeastern Ardeche region, where an estimated 3,000 homes were still without power supplies by nightfall.
Freak weather also hit southwest Denmark when a lightning strike killed 31 cows, setting a gruesome world record for the number of farm animals killed in such an accident, according to Danish news agency Ritzau.