Strong gusts of wind and giant waves flooding even highways, southern Russia and the annexed Crimean peninsula causing major power outages, as local authorities announced today.

The bad weather, which Russian media has called the “storm of the century” and a “megastorm”, began to rage yesterday, Sunday, according to rescue services.

In the Krasnodar region, where the resort towns of Sochi and Anapa are located, which many Russians prefer for their holidays, hundreds of trees and numerous metal structures on the beaches were blown away by the wind during the past night, causing injuries, the local administration announced Russian Ministry of Emergency Situations.

In Vityazevo, near Anapa, the storm capsized a large Belizean-flagged cargo ship, the Blue Shark, according to the same source.

In Sochi, the bad weather caused problems in the railway traffic due to falling trees on the railway tracks.

In Novorossiysk, also in the Krasnodar region, the Caspian Pipeline Consortium said it had suspended oil loading and sent its tankers to shelters due to “extremely adverse weather conditions”: wind gusts of up to 24 meters per second and waves reaching at a height of 8 meters.

In Crimea, the Black Sea flooded highways, with Russian television showing images of waves crashing over cars trying to drive through the water.

The governor of Crimea, Sergei Aksionov, announced via the Telegram platform that he declared a public holiday today due to the bad weather.

The storm has caused power outages, leaving about 500,000 people without electricity in Crimea, according to an adviser to Aksionov, Oleg Kryuchkov, cited by Russian news agencies.

In Sevastopol, more than 500 marine animals died when the local Aquarium flooded due to the storm, city governor Mikhail Razvozaev wrote on Telegram.

According to him, weather forecasts are not at all reassuring at the moment, as rain, snow and wind gusts of up to 30 meters per second are expected in Crimea today.