The strong winds and heavy rains that ripped across Norway on Monday, causing flooding and numerous landslides -- one of which killed a construction worker when the house he was working on was swept away -- pushed into Sweden overnight.

A man in his 80s who had been fishing on a lake near the southern Swedish town of Joenkoeping drowned in the storm.

"He was used to fishing but the wind was so strong that his boat turned over," local police spokeswoman Ulla Andersson told AFP.

A man in his 50s working to clear trees felled in a previous storm near the southern town of Aelmult was also found dead underneath a tree, but police could not confirm that his death was directly linked to the gusting winds.

In western Sweden, some 20,000 households remained without power on Tuesday morning and thousands of others had lost their telephone connections.

The Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute warned that winds would remain strong across southwestern Sweden and that the storm would pick up along the east coast throughout the day.

In central Sweden, the meteorological institute cautioned that heavy snowfall and icy roads were expected.

Further east, Finland was hit by the storm in the wee hours Tuesday with winds of up to 25 meters per second (82 feet per second) and heavy rainfall in the south.

The huge Tallink and Silja Line high-speed passenger ferries that traffic the Baltic Sea between the Helsinki and the Estonian capital were docked as the eye of the storm approached the area around midday.

Hundreds of households also woke up without electricity in the Helsinki area on Tuesday morning.

Meteorologists in Norway meanwhile predicted that the worst of the storm had passed, although its effects remained palpable.

In the south of the country about 40 roads were still blocked by landslides and the train connection between the country's two largest cities, Oslo and Bergen, remained closed as workers removed trees and boulders blocking the tracks.

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