A police spokesman said one woman in her 50s was killed outside the village of Aglish, near the south coast, by a tree falling on her car. A female passenger in her 70s suffered non-life-threatening injuries.
One man died in an accident while he was clearing a fallen tree with a chainsaw near the town of Cahir, about 35kms further inland. A second man was killed on the roads by a falling tree north of Dundalk in the northeast, close to the border with Northern Ireland, police said in a statement.
Ophelia, the largest hurricane ever recorded so far east in the Atlantic Ocean and the furthest north since 1939, was downgraded to a storm before it hit the Irish coast but nonetheless wrought havoc.
“It will bring further violent and destructive winds for a time,” Met Eireann, the Irish National Meteorological Service, said.
Flooding was also expected “due to either heavy thundery downpours or storm surges in coastal areas,” the service said after issuing a red alert for the whole country.
Winds reached 191kms per hour at Fastnet Rock, Ireland’s southernmost point, while the strongest winds recorded onshore were 156kph at the entrance to Cork Harbour in the southwest.
Seventeen millimetres of rain fell at Valentia on the southwest coast, including nine millimetres in one hour.
The Electricity Supply Board said 360,000 customers were without power, due to more than 3,200 individual faults on the network.
“All customers impacted by outages should prepare to be without electricity for a number of days,” it said. “Five to 10% of this number will be without power for up to 10 days.”
Dublin Airport scrapped 180 flights while Cork Airport cancelled most flights in what it said was the worst storm seen in its 56-year history.
Meanwhile several services to and from Shannon, the third-biggest airport, were also grounded.
“Stay indoors wherever you are until the storm has passed,” Prime Minister Leo Varadkar told reporters. “I don’t want anyone to think that this is anything other than a national emergency and a red alert.”
The department of education closed all schools, colleges and other education institutions yesterday due to the “unprecedented storm”, with minister Richard Burton saying schools would remain closed today.
Government offices were also shut.
Ireland’s top football team Cork City were hit when their stadium roof collapsed, the day before they hoped to seal the league title at their Turners Cross ground.
The eye of the storm is forecast to track across Northern Ireland and then Scotland.
London sky turns yellow
The sky over London turned an unusual shade of yellow yesterday as Storm Ophelia brought dust from the Sahara and smoke from wild fires in southern Europe that filtered out certain wavelengths of sunlight. Downgraded from a hurricane overnight, Ophelia caused three deaths in Ireland yesterday. While winds were moderate in the British capital, the yellow sky surprised Londoners, many of whom posted pictures on social media. “As Ophelia has come up from the Azores, the storm has picked up Saharan dust from North Africa and picked up dust from wild fires in Spain and Portugal,” a spokeswoman for the Met Office said.
