Heavy winter storm leaves southern Norway in chaos

A heavy winter storm rolled through Norway on Sunday, November 6, 2016, bringing heavy snow and downing trees in Agder area, the country's southernmost region.

The worst affected municipalities were Vegårshei, Kristiansand, Iveland, Birkirkara, Åmli, Grimstad, Arendal, Tvedestrand, Risør and Gjerstad.

At the height of the storm, some 9 000 households were without power. On Monday morning (local time), over 2 700 households were still off the grid.

The outages were caused by trees falling on power lines, Agder Energy spokesperson said.

“Several of those who have been working through the night are going home now, and 100 new men are coming to working and going out and continue with the fixes,” the spokesperson said.

The winter storm has also cut power to nearly 1 000 homes in Telemark and Vestfold. Some 956 households were without power on Monday morning, according to the TheLocal.

The head of emergency services in Vestfold said that the aftermath of the storm would be looked at very carefully.

“It’s one thing to lose power but at one point it also looked like we would lose water and on top of that the mobile coverage was very unstable all weekend,” he told NRK.

Featured image credit: NASA/NOAA/DoD Suomi NPP. Acquired: November 5, 2016.