The storm barreled in over the Danish shores of the North Sea, with wind gales of up to 30 meters (yards) per second and water levels rising by three to four meters (10 to 13 feet) in a number of western ports, the Danish Meteorological Institute and rescue services said.

The Great Baelt bridge, which links the eastern and western parts of the country, was closed to traffic for about three hours Thursday morning due to strong wind, according to the country's highway authority.

The gusts of wind uprooted dozens of trees and blew roofs off of houses, and the town of Odense on the island of Fyn in central Denmark was left without power for about 30 minutes after a transformer there exploded.

Boat traffic between the islands that make up the Scandinavian country was in many places suspended, as was ferry traffic to neighboring Norway, Sweden and Germany, and the Copenhagen airport was forced to close down runways and reduce its number of flights.

Scandinavian Airlines (SAS), the region's largest operator, said it had been forced to cancel about a dozen flights out of Denmark and was seeing delays of up to an hour due to the storm.

In Sweden, which was hit by the first large-scale snowstorm of the season, SAS cancelled 61 of its 282 flights out of Stockholm's airport on Thursday and was experiencing delays of several hours.

"We have had problems clearing away the snow and deicing the planes ... There is a lot of snow and it's very windy and we don't expect the weather to get better today," SAS spokeswoman Ulrika Fager told AFP.

The storm in Sweden also caused delays at train stations, pile-ups on highways, and left some 15,000 homes without electricity midday Thursday, according to power companies Sydkraft and Vattenfall.

In neighboring Norway, 10 flights out of Oslo's airport were cancelled on Thursday since the aircrafts had been unable to land at the airport in a large snowstorm the day before.

"The situation is being normalized," airport spokesman Jo Kobro said early Thursday afternoon.

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