The number of people affected by power cuts after Storm Ciaran was, in Brittany and Normandy, “up to three times higher than what was considered the storm of the century, that is, storms Lothar and Martin.” 1999,” the president of Enedis Marianne Laigneau declared this Thursday at a press conference.
At 3:00 p.m., 820,000 homes were still without electricity in France, according to the leader. As of 7 a.m. Thursday morning, the network had 1.2 million affected customers. “We are in the process of deploying all intervention resources that had been prepositioned on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday within the rapid intervention force to intervene when weather conditions allow,” said Marianne Laigneau.
New storm expected on Saturday on the Atlantic coast
“These teams are working intensively and tomorrow, perhaps by the end of the afternoon, we will be able to fly drones over our facilities to allow even more precise identification” of the lines affected by winds that reach “between 170 and 200 km/h.” “She said. “We are recovering more and more customers cut off, but at the same time the storm continues and other customers are affected,” she lamented, as Storm Ciaran hit Haute-France on Thursday afternoon.
For her part, the Minister of Energy Transition, Agnès Pannier-Runacher, expressed her fear that the Atlantic coast could be affected by the less intense storm Domingos starting on Saturday. This second episode “will probably also have a strong impact”, due to Ciaran’s first appearance. “Some trees will have been weakened, half uprooted, some roofs will have been weakened and therefore we can expect a second phase with an impact on networks and buildings,” the minister warned.
“We are now taking all measures to secure the buildings, cover, secure the roads, cut them, to allow the roads to be fully accessible, in order to prepare to overcome the second storm episode,” he concluded.
Source: BFM TV
