Berlin’s new main train station was shut down after a two-ton girder fell from the side of the glass facade onto an outdoor staircase. The station was evacuated after the beam plummeted 40 meters (130 feet) on Thursday night, but there were no injuries and the building was reopened Friday afternoon. “I can see maybe the glass falling, but not the steel,” said 38-year-old electrician Thomas Mueller, who had stopped to survey the damage. “They just built this thing eight months ago.” Virtually the entire German national railway system was shut down during the storm, with trees over many tracks and overhead power lines down. Services were being restored gradually on Friday.

“We’ve never had such a situation in Germany,” Deutsche Bahn CEO Hartmut Mehdorn said.

Off the coast of France, a coast guard tug was called to tow a damaged British container ship containing explosive materials to safety, a day after its crew of 26 was rescued from stormy seas.

More than 1 million homes had no electricity in the Czech Republic, which was hit by winds of up to 180 kph (112 mph). A million households in Germany suffered blackouts and tens of thousands of homes in Poland and Austria also were hit.

The storm led to the deaths of at least four people in the Czech Republic, 12 in Germany, 14 in Britain, six in the Netherlands, three in France, two in Belgium and six in Poland.

It was the highest death toll from a storm in Europe since 1999 when gales downed trees and driving snow brought on avalanches, killing more than 120 people.

Climate researchers had been predicting stormy weather this year for parts of Europe, saying that unusually high temperatures in the North Atlantic — 0.5 to 1 degree Celsius (around 1 to 2 degrees Fahrenheit) above normal — would allow winds to accumulate more moisture and surge in energy.

“In times of rapid climactic change, extreme events arise more frequently,” said Peter Werner, of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Research.

Europe has been experiencing an extremely warm winter and has already been hit by several storms.

“If we don’t get climate change under control, winter’s just going to get worse,” said Joern Ehlers, spokesman for the World Wide Fund For Nature.

Still, David Viner, a senior scientist at the Climatic Research Unit at Britain’s University of East Anglia, said it was nearly impossible to hold climate change responsible for any one storm.

“A mid Atlantic depression like we had yesterday, we can’t say exactly that global warming has anything to do with it,” he said, adding that climate change was still likely to be bad news.

“The bottom line is that global warming will result in more intense storms in the long run,” he said.

Most of the people killed in the storm were motorists, but in Germany they also included two firefighters — one hit by a falling tree and the other dying of a heart attack — and an 18-month old child in Munich hit by a terrace door that was ripped from its hinges.

In London, a toddler was killed when a brick wall collapsed on him.

As winds calmed Friday, airports reported some delays and cancellations but were returning to normal.

Frankfurt Airport reported that flights were departing normally after some morning delays and 200 cancellations on Thursday.

German national airline Lufthansa canceled 331 internal flights on Thursday, affecting nearly 19,000 passengers. Intercontinental flights were largely on time on Friday, spokesman Thomas Jachnow said.

British Airways canceled 34 incoming flights to London’s Heathrow and Gatwick airports and the two main London to Scotland rail routes ran much-reduced services.

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