Wickedly Strong Winds Rip across Europe*

WARSAW (AP) — Fierce Strong winds swept across parts of northern and
central Europe on Sunday, toppling trees, downing power lines and
causing road and railway disruptions.

In Poland, where strong winds and rain hit large parts of the country
overnight, a tree fell onto a passing car in the northeastern region of
Masuria, killing the driver and injuring a woman and child, local media
reported.

Three other people were injured in separate incidents in Poland during
the storm, which caused widespread damage to roofs and electricity
outages in some areas, reports said.

In Sweden, a Scandlines passenger ferry traveling from Rostock, Germany,
hit a pier in the port of Trelleborg late Saturday as a result of stormy
weather in the south of Sweden. The collision left an 60-foot crack in
the front of the ferry, a company spokesman said.

All passengers were evacuated safely and no one was injured, Scandlines
spokesman Jens Henrik Nybo said.

In Austria, wind gusts reached 75 miles per hour in lower elevations in
northeastern, eastern and southeastern parts of the country, according
to the Central Institute for Meteorology and Geodynamics. At some higher
elevations, gusts reached roughly 90 miles per hour. Downed power lines
temporarily left 130,000 households without electricity over the course
of the day, several thousand of which would most likely also have to
spend the night in the dark, Austrian broadcaster ORF reported Sunday
evening.

The risk associated with the high winds forced most ski resorts in Upper
Austria to suspend or cut back on their lift operations. Some ski
resorts in Tyrol also stopped operating their lifts as a precaution.

Two employees at a McDonald's restaurant in the southern city of Graz
were hit by parts of a roof that had blown loose, and were hospitalized
with serious head injuries Sunday morning, ORF reported. In southwestern
Austria, a 63-year-old man was hospitalized after falling off a roof and
in the southeastern province of Styria four firefighters were injured in
several incidents.

In Lower Austria, some 1,200 firefighters worked overnight to clear
debris and to bring two small forest fires under control, APA reported.
One of the blazes, which burned about 7 acres of forest, started when
two downed electricity wires touched, setting fire to foliage and tree
branches, police said.

Styrian authorities had to close several roads and briefly blocked a
number of tunnels on a major highway on Sunday morning because of storm
damage. Train traffic was also interrupted, in part due to damage to
overhead lines.

In the Czech Republic, trees fell onto tracks and halted traffic on a
major railway route to neighboring Poland and Slovakia in the eastern
part of the country early in the day, causing delays of up to 4 hours.
Hundreds of people lost electricity in that region, Czech media reported.