Some 260,000 homes were still without electricity on the morning of Saturday, November 4, due to the passage of storm Ciaran, announced Enedis, public manager of the electricity distribution network.
“At 8 a.m., 260,000 customers remain to be replenished, particularly in Brittany (200,000) and Normandy (51,000),” it is explained in a press release. Since the passage of the storm, “78% of customers have been restored”, or more than 900,000 homes, said Enedis, which has mobilized 3,400 employees and service providers since Thursday morning.
The previous Enedis update reported 875,000 customers without electricity on Friday at 6 p.m. There were 1.2 million as of Thursday morning after the storm passed.
Storm Ciaran claimed the lives of three people in France and left damage that will take several days to resolve.
New storm Saturday
The President of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron, who visited Finistère, the most affected department, on Friday, called on the population to “remain extremely vigilant” in the coming days. “We have a fight, which is to restore normal life as quickly as possible,” he also said, with the objective of restoring electricity to 90% of affected households by Monday.
Météo-France will place eleven departments on orange alert on Saturday evening as Storm Domingos approaches, which will cause “violent gusts of wind” on the Atlantic coast, meteorologists said. In particular, Vendée, Deux-Sèvres, Vienne, Charente-Maritime, Charente and Gironde are affected by an orange wind alert from 6 p.m.
Friday morning, government spokesperson Olivier Véran spoke of “quite variable situations, places where the repair [was] going to be able to be done in the coming hours and places, particularly in Finistère, where the power lines [ had] been completely chopped up.” This department concentrated “more than half” of homes without electricity in Brittany, he said.