Storm Ciaran: The human, material and financial costs on France

Storm Ciaran, which broke wind records across France and the rest of Western Europe, has hit the Atlantic coast hard and left significant human, material and financial damages.

Read the original French article here.

“It’s an exceptional event,” said Marianne Laigneau, chairwoman of French electricity distributor Enedis, at a conference held in the Manche department following the biggest night of the storm (1-2 November). She was joined there by Energy Transition Minister Agnès Pannier-Runacher.

For Brittany and Normandy, the damage was “out of the ordinary” and even more devastating than the historic storms Lothar and Martin in 1999 – which covered 55% of mainland France – and the hurricane in 1987, she added.

In mainland France, three days after the storm, authorities have counted 47 injured and four dead – including one Enedis employee who was struck by lightning while repairing a high-voltage power line after the storm had passed.

The death toll rose after the second day of the storm, injuring five more people, plus a further 38 people who are suffering from carbon monoxide poisoning as a result of heating and generator failures, and 17 people injured as a result of clearing debris.

Elsewhere in Europe, the death toll was in the dozens: seven in Tuscany in Italy, four in Portugal after a Danish-flagged vessel capsized in heavy seas, and two in Belgium. Spain, Germany and the Netherlands all reported one death each.

Material damage

The day after the storm, thousands of state employees were on high alert. France had 3,200 firefighters and more than 600 military police mobilised. On Monday evening (6 November), there were still 300 firefighters mobilised.

They performed “almost 11,000 interventions since the start of this storm”, said Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne on Friday in Caen, Normandy.

In terms of infrastructure, air, road and rail services were disrupted and are now gradually being restored.

For the electricity network, the distribution operator Enedis dispatched more than 3,000 agents, supported by 200 from transmission network operator RTE, joined by 48 others from the Irish ESB Network.

The damage to the electricity network was three times greater than in 1999, as French President Emmanuel Macron pointed out when he came to Brittany on Tuesday.

The electricity grid took a huge hit with 1.2 million homes left without power in the aftermath of storm Ciaran, including one in two in the Finistère region in Brittany.

On Tuesday morning, 62,000 homes were still without electricity.

As for telecommunications, 3,000 agents have been working since last week to reconnect more than a million people to the telephone network.

“We can hope to restore mobile communications in the next few days, and in the next few weeks […] to restore fixed-line communications,” Digital Economy Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said on Monday.

“We will have to learn the lessons from these episodes” and step up coordination of the electricity and telephone networks, he added.

The storm also had a huge impact on the agriculture sector.

In addition to the more than 100 farms affected in France’s leading agricultural region, Britanny, 50 hectares of protected Natura 2000 forests were cleared in the Hauts-de-France region, while oyster farmers in the north and along the Atlantic coast reported damage to most of their farms.  

Financial damage 

Although it is currently impossible to have a precise figure for how much the damage will cost, the bill is likely to be substantial, ranging from €750 million to €1 billion, depending on the insurers, explained French Ecological Transition Minister Christophe Béchu on Sunday.

We are “a long way from the billions involved in the 1999 storm”, but there are “no doubt many claims [for compensation] that have not yet been made”, warned Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire.

But more damage may well have to be counted, due to the outbreak of major flooding in the Hauts-de-France region that came after Ciaran’s passage.

“We know that, unfortunately, climate change is going to increase the number of storms and cyclones,” said Béchu.

But for the time being, data from the French weather service Météo France shows that, since 1980, there has been no increase in the intensity or frequency of storms.

“There is no clear scientific consensus on the effect of climate change on changes in the frequency or intensity of storms in France,” Météo France added.

However, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates that Europe as a whole could see an increase in the number, intensity and consequences of storms and hurricanes over the next few years.

[Edited by Nathalie Weatherald and Frédéric Simon. Clara Bauer-Babef, Hugo Struna and Théophane Hartmann contributed to the reporting]

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