Tens of thousands of customers across a large swathe of southwestern and western Finland remained without power on Monday morning, following damage caused by Storm Hannes over the weekend.
Reports of power outages began as the storm swept in on Saturday. The number of outages grew as the storm continued its path of destruction, taking down trees and power lines.
As of around 9:30 am on Monday, there were still more than 33,000 customers without power, according to Finnish Energy's power outage map.
Households in Central Ostrobothnia, as well as the Pirkanmaa region, were particularly affected by the storm.
Earlier on Monday there were still more than 7,400 households in Pirkanmaa without power. According to local energy firm Elenia, the damage caused by Hannes was the firm's biggest disruption in the past decade.
Further west and north, in Central Ostrobothnia, many trees had fallen on power lines during the storm, according to local electricity company Korpelan Voima. The firm said that customer calls about power outages had overwhelmed their phone lines on Sunday.
As of early Monday morning, the most households in the area still without electricity were in Kokkala (1,600).
Rescue services in Central Ostrobothnia were busy throughout the weekend, day and night, responding to several hundred calls. Their main tasks included clearing trees from roads, buildings and power lines. According to local authorities, the clearing work is expected to continue this week, at the minimum.
According to forest management associations in South and Central Ostrobothnia, the damage caused by the storm will easily amount to at least hundreds of thousands of euros.
