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BARCELONA, Spain: Spanish and French rescuers battled on Sunday to douse forest fires, clear up wrecked homes and restore power and rail networks after hurricane-force winds killed 15 people, four of them children.
The children died near the Spanish city of Barcelona when the roof and a wall of a sports hall were brought down on their heads Saturday by winds that in some places roared at more than 180 kilometres an hour.
They were playing baseball outside the centre in Sant Boi de Llobregat as the storm - which saw 20-metre high waves battering the coast - gathered force and they ran inside to shelter, media reports said.
"When we went inside it was just horrific," Jose Antonio Gordina, whose son narrowly escaped the collapse, told El Mundo newspaper.
"We heard a very loud noise and thought a tree had fallen on a house roof. When we got there the ceiling of the hall had literally been torn off and the wall fell onto the kids," he said.
Saturday's storm was one of the fiercest storms to hit Europe in a decade.
It blew in eastwards from the Atlantic Ocean, barrelling across southwest France and northern Spain and ripping roofs off houses, pulling down power lines and flattening hundreds of thousands of trees.
On Sunday it was battering Italy. The wind lost some of its force but was strong enough to destroy a restaurant in Imperia on the Mediterranean coast and to force some ferry operators to cancel sailings.
In Spain, hundreds of firefighters, backed up by 14 planes and helicopters, were on Sunday battling with three separate forest fires believed to have been sparked by electricity pylons brought down by the tempest.
Over the border in southwest France, squadrons of technicians from across Europe were battling to get the power and rail networks back on track.
A dozen helicopters flew over the storm-struck zone to locate damaged power lines and direct a thousand workers deployed from electricity grid operator ERDF's rapid intervention team to restore power to 1.1 million homes.
More technicians from Germany, Britain and Portugal were on their way to join the operation, ERDF said, and President Nicolas Sarkozy was due in the area later in the day to inspect the damage inflicted by Saturday's storm.
Hundreds of generators were being delivered to old people's homes and other priority sites to tide them over until power returned after the storm -- the worst to hit France since 1999 when a powerful storm killed dozens and uprooted millions of trees.
Fallen trees hampered police and other emergency services from getting to many alerts and brought trains and bus services to a halt. Many rail routes were still cut on Sunday.
"It's the apocalypse," said Peio Poueyts, an official in the tourism office in Biarritz on the Atlantic coast.
Much of the Gironde and Landes regions have key forestry industries but huge areas were flattened by the storm, officials said.
"It is a catastrophe for tree growers," said Eric Dumontet, of the main regional forestry union, adding that hundreds of hectares (thousands of acres) of trees had been flattened.
Phone operator France Telecom said its technicians were trying to restore service to its 350,000 fixed line and mobile clients who were cut off by the storm.
Two drivers were killed by falling trees in the Landes, while a 78-year-old was killed by flying debris outside his home, officials said. A 73-year-old women died in the Gironde department when power cuts halted her breathing machine.
But most of the dead were reported in Spain.
Besides the victims in the sports hall, a woman was crushed by a wall in Barcelona, where a city worker was also killed. Another woman died Saturday in the northern Castilla-Leone region when a door, lifted by the winds, crashed into her.
In Galicia, a civil guard sergeant was killed by a falling tree as he was directing traffic.
In the southeastern Spanish province of Alicante, a 51-year-old man was also killed by a collapsing wall and one of six seamen rescued from a Portuguese cargo ship by helicopter off Galicia died, media reported.
A 60-year-old man in Catalonia province was also killed in an accident.
Some 14,000 people were also evacuated in the Alicante region due to a forest fire started by a downed cable.
Flights were halted throughout the storm region and ski resorts in the Pyrenees were closed due to the risk of avalanches.
The strong winds were also felt across the Mediterranean, with two people killed in the eastern Algerian town of Setif when the wall of a house collapsed, civil protection forces said.
- AFP/yb
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