LONDON (AP) — Britain issued five “severe” flood alerts on Monday, warning there’s a danger to life after Storm Dennis dumped weeks worth of rain in some places. It gale-force winds also caused flooding and power outages across other parts of northern Europe.
The severe flood warnings were for the central English counties of Worcestershire, Herefordshire and Shropshire. The Met Office, Britain’s meteorological agency, issued another 221 flood warnings for England, along with 24 for Wales and 12 for Scotland.
The weather system brought winds of more than 145 kph (90 mph) and up to 150 millimeters (6 inches) of rain over the weekend.
Forecasters said river levels in parts of northern England had yet to reach their peak. In the northern England city of York, authorities were piling up more than 4,000 sandbags as the Rover Ouse continued to rise. It’s expected to peak on Tuesday.
Other residents in parts of Wales and western England were cleaning up Monday after the storm flooded roads, railways, homes and businesses and disrupted travel across Britain.
The British environment secretary said climate change was making extreme weather events more common, but denied tha t Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative gover nment was unprepared.
“We’ll never be able to protect every single household just because of the nature of climate change and the fact that these weather events are becoming more extreme, but we’ve done everything that we can do with a significant sum of money, and there’s more to come,” Minister George Eustice said.
Across the North Sea, strong winds and heavy rain caused flooding, road closures and electricity outages across the Nordic and Baltic regions.
In Norway, more than half a dozen roads and several passes were closed. The southwestern Denmark city of Kolding and its surrounding were flooded as gale force winds and heavy rain battered the area.
Emergency services in the city at the end of the Kolding Fjord on the eastern side of the Jutland peninsula were pumping out water from basements and using sand bags to try to contain the flooding.
In Estonia, some 1,200 households were without electricity, the Baltic News Service reported.
