The storm uprooted trees, blew out windows and left 1.2 million French households without electricity on Thursday.
Heavy rain associated with the storm pushed ashore at the south-west tip of England, and the UK’s national weather forecaster warned of flood risks and urged people to take precautions.
Dutch airline KLM scrapped all flights from the early afternoon until the end of the day, citing the high sustained wind speeds and powerful gusts expected in the Netherlands.
“It looks like a once-in-every-few-years storm for the UK and France,” said Bob Henson, a meteorologist and science writer with Yale Climate Connections, adding that Ciaran could turn into “a once in a generation storm”.
A weather-related death was already confirmed in France. A truck driver was killed when his vehicle was hit by a tree in northern France’s inland region of Aisne, transport minister Clement Beaune said.
Nearly all coastlines of the French mainland were under severe weather warnings on Thursday morning, from Calais on the English Channel to all the way down the shores of the Atlantic Ocean to Spain, as well as much of France’s Mediterranean coast and Corsica, according to national weather service Meteo-France.
The weather service reported record-breaking wind speeds of 108mph along the Brittany coast. The wind reached up to 96mph on the Normandy coast and up to 90mph inland. Waves of almost 33 feet were expected in the country’s north-western tip.
Local trains were cancelled across a swathe of western France, and all roads in the Finistere region of Brittany were closed on Thursday morning.
Mr Beaune urged people to avoid driving and to at least exercise caution when travelling across areas with weather warnings.
“We see how roads can be fatal in these circumstances,” he told broadcaster France-Info.
The storm cut power to some 1.2 million French households as of Thursday morning, electrical utility Enedis announced in a statement.
That includes about half of the homes in Brittany, the Atlantic peninsula hardest hit by Ciaran. Enedis said it would deploy 3,000 workers to restore power as soon as weather conditions allowed.
The national train authority, the SNCF, cancelled some regional trains in five eastern regions starting late Wednesday night. Fast trains from Paris were eliminating intermediary stops on route to Rennes and several other destinations.
