Cyclone Kills 2, Cuts Power to Half a Million Across Latvia and Lithuania

A powerful cyclone slammed into the Baltic states on Saturday, August 22, and carried into Sunday morning, killing two people and cutting electricity to roughly half a million residents across Latvia and Lithuania, according to the Associated Press.

Andris Viksna of the Latvian Environment, Geology and Meteorology Center told the AP the storm was "the most severe storm in Latvia since 2005 in terms of its overall impact."

In Jelgava, in central Latvia, one person died Saturday when part of a building collapsed. Others were injured elsewhere in the country. Wind gusts topped 67 mph in the capital, Riga, on Saturday, and some monitoring stations recorded half of their average monthly rainfall in a single day, per the AP.

More than a quarter-million people lost power in Latvia alone, and mobile phone service was disrupted in parts of the country. Fallen trees and debris knocked out rail and other public transit links. Riga's airport warned Sunday morning that flights could face delays or reroutes because of the overnight storm.

In Lithuania, one person died after being struck by a falling tree. Others were injured, and more than 200,000 residents were without power as of Sunday morning, the AP reported.

Estonia took a hit too, with the western and northern regions and its islands bearing the brunt. Ferry service to the islands was disrupted, and trains arriving from Latvia and Lithuania ran late. Northeastern Poland also lost power to more than 100,000 people.

On the climate question, Viksna told the AP the storm's connection to climate change "cannot be properly assessed yet," but said "it is plausible that human-caused climate change may have intensified the rainfall associated with the cyclone."

Officials expected conditions to improve Sunday and to be largely resolved by Monday, August 24, according to the AP.

A Separate Storm, A Different Continent

Breitbart's coverage of "Storm Goretti" hitting the UK and northern France in January 2026, with gusts up to 99 mph in the Isles of Scilly and hundreds of thousands losing power in France, is a genuinely separate weather event from a different month and a different storm system. It has no direct connection to this weekend's Baltic cyclone. Readers searching for Baltic storm news should not conflate the two, and neither should reporters. The Goretti coverage shows this has been a rough year for European storm damage generally, not that it's the same event.

The wire coverage here, carried nearly verbatim by the AP and republished by outlets including The Independent, Newsday, Local10 and others, is consistent across the board. No outlet in this set contradicted the death toll, the power outage figures, or Viksna's quotes.

What's missing from all the coverage: no outlet has yet reported a total damage estimate in dollars or euros, nor has any Baltic government announced a formal disaster declaration or reconstruction fund as of Sunday morning. Also unclear is the exact number of injuries beyond "others were injured" in both Latvia and Lithuania, a vague figure that no source in this set has broken down further.

The next concrete marker to watch: whether power is fully restored by Monday, August 24, as Latvian officials expected, and whether Riga airport's flight delays clear up as the storm system moves off. If restoration slips past Monday, that would suggest the damage to the grid was worse than initial assessments indicated.