Four people were killed and 18 injured in a storm that battered Poland with hurricane-force winds on Thursday night, authorities said, damaging properties and felling trees across western and central areas of the country.

Iran PressEurope: A powerful storm blasted across parts of Europe on Thursday, killing four people in Poland and causing damage and disruption across a large swath of the continent.

According to reports in Polish media, the hardest-hit area was around the western city of Wroclaw, where powerful gusts topped a delivery truck, killing its driver. Elsewhere, the storm knocked down a wall of a building being renovated, crushing a worker to death, and a tree was blown onto a car carrying two people, killing them both.

Also, some 250,000 French homes have been left without electricity after powerful overnight winds barreled across France, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands. 

The year's first violent autumn storm hit large parts of Germany causing damage in several states, as well as knocking out train service. 

In the Netherlands, gusts ripped tiles off roofs and uprooted trees in a residential neighborhood in the southwestern town of Barendrecht, injuring at least four people, according to local media. 

Firefighters in Westerhoek, a Belgian town close to the Dutch border, said they had been called out dozens of times overnight to deal with storm damage.

The results of a study on the impact of climate change on the occurrence of storms and floods in Europe indicates that climate change has increased the devastating floods in Europe by up to 9 times.

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