STOCKHOLM, Jan 9: At least 11 people were reported dead on Sunday after a fierce storm swept across Denmark and Sweden, leaving more than 400,000 households without power, disrupting road and rail traffic and causing heavy damage.

Hurricane strength winds whipped across the region overnight and into Sunday morning as authorities urged people to stay indoors if possible. In southern Sweden, four motorists were killed when uprooted trees fell on their cars.

A fifth was killed by a passing car when he tried to remove a fallen tree from a road, and another man sustained fatal injuries on his farm when bales of hay came crashing down on him during the storm.

Yet another man fell to his death from the roof of his home as he tried to secure tiles, media reported. In Denmark, police said two motorists died when trees tumbled onto their cars. Two other people were killed when they were hit by a roof that blew off a building in nearby Assens.

Winds in western Denmark reached speeds of up to 151 kilometres an hour when the storm hit on Saturday, the Danish DMI meteorological service said. In Sweden alone, some 405,000 households were left without electricity, primarily in the southern and western parts of the country.

By late Sunday afternoon, almost 24 hours after the storm hit, power had been restored to 67,000 homes, power companies Vattenfall, Sydkraft and Fortum said. Due to sustained heavy winds and the risk of falling trees, repair work on the lines was slow to get started, the companies said.

Another 130,000 homes were without fixed telephone lines, mostly in western and southern Sweden, as base stations lost power and crews were unable to reach emergency generators because of the storm.

Train traffic in southern Sweden was heavily disrupted on Sunday after being suspended overnight. A spokesman for the Swedish rail authority Banverket, Mattias Hennius, said he expected delays to last for several days as crews clean up the tracks. Dozens of ferry routes to and from Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Britain and Germany were cancelled. -AFP