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Nearly 3,000 left without power after winter storm hits Norway

NTB/The Local
NTB/The Local - [email protected]
Nearly 3,000 left without power after winter storm hits Norway
At one point, some 9,000 households were without power. File photo: Berit Keilen / NTB scanpix

Over 2,7000 households in Agder were still without power on Monday morning after heavy snowfall downed trees in the area.

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“At 6am there were 2,711 who were still without power in Agder. What we can see is that new outages are being caused by new trees falling across [power] lines and causing outages,” Unni Farestveit of power company  Agder Energi said. 
 
Parts of the Agder area have been without power since Saturday morning due to heavy snowfall. On Sunday morning, there were just over 9,000 households without power but many of those had service restored throughout the course of the day. 
 
The worst affected municipalities are Vegårshei, Kristiansand, Iveland, Birkirkara, Åmli, Grimstad, Arendal, Tvedestrand, Risør and Gjerstad.
 
Farestveit said his employees were working around the clock to restore service. 
 
“Several of those who have been working through the night are going home now, and 100 new men are coming to working and going out and continue with the fixes,” he said early on Monday. 
 
In Vegardshei, residents were offered emergency housing at a municipal-run care centre if they wanted to evacuated their homes. 
 
The winter storm has also cut power for nearly residents of Telemark and Vestfold. Some 956 households were without power on Monday morning, according to Skagerrak Energi.
 
In Lardal in Vestfold, municipal homes for the elderly were evacuated on Sunday.
 
“Some residents were picked up by relatives and some were accommodated in the nursing home, but there were also others who wanted to remain in their apartments”, Mayor Knut Olav Omholt told broadcaster NRK.
 
In several municipalities, mobile phone service was also out for extended periods. 
 
Jan Helge Kaiser, the head of emergency services in Vestfold, said that the aftermath of the winter storm would be looked at carefully. 
 
“It’s one thing to lose power but at one point it also looked like we would lose water and on top of that the mobile coverage was very unstable all weekend,” he told NRK.

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