Hurricane-Force Winds Hit Northern U.K.

A man passes by two cars crushed under an uprooted tree during heavy storms in Amsterdam, Netherlands, Thursday Jan. 18, 2007. Northern Europe was buffeted by an unusually strong storm Thursday that killed at least one person, disrupted the schedule of U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and wreaked transportation havoc in the air, on land and at sea. (AP Photo/Peter Dejong) (Peter Dejong - AP)

LONDON -- Hurricane-force winds and heavy downpours hammered northern Europe on Thursday, killing 27 people and disrupting travel for tens of thousands _ including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, whose plane circled for 15 minutes before landing amid winds gusting to 77 mph.

The storms were among the fiercest in years, ripping off part of the roof at Lord's Cricket Ground in London, toppling a crane in the Netherlands and upending trucks on Europe's busiest highway.

By evening, weather-related accidents had killed 27 people, including a 2-year-old boy hit by falling brick from a toppled wall in London.

Rice cut short her visit to Berlin in order to leave for London before winds worsened, landing at Heathrow Airport in winds gusting up to 77 mph.

"It's not often you get winds of that sort of strength that far inland," said John Hammond of Britain's weather office. "(Rice) did well to land there, I wouldn't have fancied doing that."

German meteorologists recorded gusts up to 118 mph, forcing dozens of flight cancelations, shutting schools and prompting the national railroad to suspend services across a swath of the country.

"We are still at a standstill nationwide," with only a few trains running, Hans-Georg Zimmermann, the spokesman of the national railroad, Deutsche Bahn, told n-tv television.

Hartmut Mehdorn, chief executive of Deutsche Bahn, said: "We have never yet had such a situation in Germany."

At Berlin's central railway station, Luise Mazur Reinhold, 79, sat disconsolately on a bench.

"What should we do now? They threw us off the train 10 minutes ago," said Mazur, from southern Poland, who had hoped to travel to Hamburg to celebrate her husband's birthday with friends. "We had invited all these people to his 85th birthday, but now we just can't get there."

Traffic on the Eurostar, the train service connecting Britain with continental Europe through the Channel Tunnel, was suspended after an electrical cable holder fell onto the tracks near the northern French city of Lille, France's national railway company said.

In London, harried commuters struggled through road closures caused by falling debris blown from glass-paneled office buildings and medieval churches. The city's slender Millennium Bridge was closed after the suspension structure began swaying dangerously in the wind.