More storms were expected to hammer the two countries yesterday as the cost of the driving rain and 130kmh winds was being counted.

Five French fishermen had to be rescued from a trawler which sank late on Monday in gale-force winds off the Channel island of Guernsey, while a cargo vessel was blown aground on the French coast.

Separately, a body feared to be that of a man missing since Sunday was recovered off the coast of Brittany in north-west France.

In the French town of Normandy, a woman died after her car was hit by a falling branch.

In Britain, more than 200 flights had to be cancelled at airports and the port of Dover was temporarily closed due to the storms, which started on Sunday and are expected to cause millions of pounds in damage.

A spokesman for airport operator BAA said that 115 flights from Heathrow had been cancelled by Monday evening, but could not give details on the number of cancellations at London's Gatwick Airport.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown had to cancel a planned meeting with Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico after his flight from Bratislava was cancelled because of the bad weather.

Sweeping in from the Atlantic, the storm hit first in Cornwall and Devon in the south-west of Britain before moving east across England and Wales.

There was widespread disruption on trains in southern England, including London where underground train services were also hit by flooding.

About 30 people were rescued when a beachfront caravan park was flooded by sea water, which breached defences near Chichester on the English south coast.

Further west, a Swedish tanker with 13 crew members got into difficulties off the Isle of Wight, the coastguard said. Two coastguard tugs were sent to help the stricken 11,000-tonne Astral.

In France, an 88m-long cargo vessel, the Artemis, ran aground on a beach at Sables-d'Olonne on the Atlantic coast and a French trawler, the Marie Louise Bert, sank. The vessel, based in Saint-Brieuc with five crew members, went down 41 nautical miles west of Guernsey.

Meanwhile, the body found off the Brittany coast was feared to be that of a 26-year-old man missing since falling into the sea at Relecq-Kerhuon near the port city of Brest.

The distribution arm of energy group EDF also said in a statement that about 60,000 French households were without electricity on Monday because of the storms. The situation was expected to worsen as the evening progressed.

At one point, the wind was gusting up to 155kmh, according to French weather experts.

'We haven't had one this strong this year,' said Mr Emmanuel Bocri, a forecaster for Meteo France. 'In general, there are one or two of this strength each winter.'

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE, BLOOMBERG