AFP

RENNES - After battering northern France with record winds of 200 kilometres per hour that killed a lorry driver, Storm Ciaran headed north on Thursday with Britain on high alert amid warnings of flooding, blackouts and major travel disruptions.

Some 1.2 million French homes lost electricity overnight as the storm lashed the northwest coast, ripping trees out of the ground.

The death was caused by a tree falling on the cabin of a heavy goods vehicle in the Aisne department, emergency services told AFP.

"The wind gusts are exceptional in Brittany and many absolute records have been broken," the national weather service Meteo-France said on X (formerly Twitter).

France went on high alert as a storm dubbed Ciaran threatened to bring gale-force winds and extreme rainfall to the north and west, as well as Britain and Ireland.

The prefect for the local department said gusts as high as 207 km/h were recorded at Pointe du Raz on the tip of the northwest coast, while the port city of Brest saw winds hit 156 km/h.

In southern England, hundreds of schools were closed as large waves powered by winds of 135 km/hour crashed along the coastline.

On the Channel Island of Jersey, residents had to be evacuated to hotels overnight as gusts of up to 164 km/hour damaged homes, according to local media.

The Netherlands also warned of powerful gusts of up to 100 km/h, with workers told to avoid commuting and more than 200 flights marked as cancelled at Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport, a major European hub.

Rail and ferry services, including the Eurostar that links the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Germany and the UK, saw cancellations and delays.

Roosmarijn Knol, weather forecaster for Dutch public broadcaster NOS, said the timing of the storm was important.

"Due to a warm autumn with a lot of rain, trees still have their leaves, and the ground is as wet as a sponge. Therefore, especially weak trees have a good chance of falling over. That is a big difference from an autumn storm at, say, the end of November, when all the leaves have already fallen," said Knol.

Floods

Britain's Environment Agency warned of "significant flooding along parts of the south coast and along parts of the Yorkshire and Northeast coasts on Thursday".

The effects of the storm were felt as far south as Spain and Portugal, with Spanish authorities warning of waves as high as nine metres along the Atlantic coast.

In France's northern Pas-de-Calais, authorities opened gymnasiums and shelters for migrants who converge on the region hoping to make it to Britain by boat.

But despite some damaged buildings and cars, there was some relief in France.

"We were expecting worse. There was obviously a big blast of wind, but no major damage," said one local mayor Olivier Lepick.

There was disappointment, however, for the hardy athletes of the annual Dutch "headwind cycle championships" race.

They only hold their race along the Oosterscheldekering storm surge barrier in the western Netherlands if the wind is above a gale seven on the Beaufort Scale (up to 61 kilometres per hour), but they finally met their match with Storm Ciaran and had to cancel.

There were "many disappointed faces," organiser Robrecht Stoekenbroek told local agency ANP, vowing to go ahead when the storm passed.