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Latest update: 09/12/2010
- France - weather
Heavy snow and icy roads cause travel chaos in Paris region
Heavy snow has paralysed transport systems across much of Europe. In Paris, thousands of travellers were stranded by flight delays while commuters trudged through snow and ice that suspended bus service and slowed traffic to a crawl.
AFP - Icy roads paralysed much of the Paris region Thursday after the heaviest snow in a quarter of a century, while harsh weather in Germany hit flights and prompted major delays in rail travel.
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French Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux asked drivers not to travel unless absolutely necessary the day after 11 centimetres (more than four inches) of snow fell on Paris, the most in one day since 1987.
He said around 1,000 motorists had to spend the night snow-bound in their cars, although that figure paled in comparison with the 60,000 who slept in their cars during a 2003 blizzard.
Thousands spent the night at Charles de Gaulle airport, France's main international hub, after their flights were cancelled, and thousands more stranded motorists were put up in municipal halls and school sports halls around the Paris region.
Police late Wednesday barred trucks from travelling on roads in the Paris region, with around 3,000 lorries stuck on northern French motorways headed for the capital.
But lorries were allowed to take to the road again by late afternoon Thursday as road conditions began to improve.
There were flight delays and cancellations at Charles de Gaulle because of icy runways and fuel trucks' inability to get to planes, Air France said, advising passengers to check their flight status ahead of time.
Flights during the day were delayed up to two hours, airport authorities said late Thursday but the situation was slowly getting back to normal.
The Eiffel Tower reopened after ice forced its closure on Wednesday.
Amid rising public anger at the authorities' perceived inability to deal with the situation, Hortefeux postponed a trip to Morocco and said he would send experts to other European cities to see how they deal with snow and ice.
Prime Minister Francois Fillon, on a visit to Russia, accused the Meteo France weather service of having "failed to forecast the snow and in any case not its intensity" thereby catching clearing services by surprise.
In Germany heavy snowfall sparked chaos in the country's transport networks, with hundreds of flights cancelled and major delays for rail passengers, authorities said.
Wintry conditions prompted the shutdown of Frankfurt international airport, Germany's busiest, from 2100 GMT Wednesday to about 0100 GMT Thursday, a spokeswoman said, leading to a major backlog throughout the day.
Nearly 3,000 people were stranded in Frankfurt and slept at nearby hotels or the airport itself, where beds were set up. Of the nearly 1,400 flights scheduled Thursday, 400 were cancelled.
"The situation is slowly getting back to normal," the spokeswoman said. "The snowfall has stopped and our runways are clear."
The airport reported 15 centimetres (six inches) of snow Thursday afternoon.
In Berlin where snow averaged 17 centimetres (more than six inches) some 200 flights were scrapped at the two main international airports, about one-third of those scheduled, a spokesman said.
Train travel was hit by major delays, with high-speed trains forced to slow to 160 kilometres (100 miles) per hour from the 250 kilometres per hour in normal conditions, the state-owned rail company said.
Snow and ice on the roads provoked thousands of accidents and major traffic jams on the autobahns, including a 40-kilometre- (25-mile-)long bottleneck in the central state of Thuringia.
Britain also suffered from the early cold snap that descended on Europe, with Scotland the worst hit by the snow and ice that paralysed many roads earlier in the week.
"It is the most widespread heavy snow in Britain in November since 1965. The weather in December has continued on a similar note," said a spokesman for the Met Office, the national forecasters for Britain.
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Comments (5)
@ greatlakes resident... I am
@ greatlakes resident... I am also an American citizen living in Paris... this is not a normal storm for Paris.. I am aware that it's nothing for your part of the world. I lived in Chicago for 6 years. However it is a news story here. Don't be so sanctimonious. It makes us Americans who live here look bad.
snow
I am from Atlanta and we have very little salt, sand and just a few snowplows (2 I think.) We also don't have enough de-icers to de-ice the planes at the world's busiest airport (Hartsfield-Jackson.) Like Paris, who gets gulf stream air and snow melts more quickly than your hometown, we don't need the equipment. Please don't be obnoxious in your comments about Paris. They probably have much better transportation, museums, restaurants, and a lot more than your great lakes city. You should appreciate that this amount of snow is unusual for them and they are being careful (not lazy!) with the shutdowns.
p.s. I was once in a huge interstate traffic jam south of L.A. because of a drizzle of rain! It was a unique situation for that city! To each his/her own!
Yes, they do
In a place where you get over 200 cm of snow a year as you say, your government has the facilities and services in place to specifically handle that.
This is a once a year (sometimes) occurrence for countries like France, Spain, England, they simply can't have the same sort of support fleets sitting read as a region like yours, ready to react to these.
I was trapped in my car for four and a half hours from Velizy to Versailles last night, it was extremely bad but once an accident or two occurs and everyone is sitting bumper to bumper, how exactly is a road gritter supposed to get down it and clear it?
Yes, we call it snow
The Anonyme poster (08:03am) is clearly clueless about the situation. It's true that the Great Lakes do have much more snow than this and keep running. However, that area, like many others, know that they are going to get sustained snowfall for several months every single winter.
This is not the case in the UK, France or other parts of Western Europe. Some times we can go several years without seeing snow at all. The economy can not afford to keep massive fleets of snow ploughs on stand-by and store up millions of tons of grit, just on the off chance that this will be the year we get a freak snow storm.
Get your facts straight next time before making wild and baseless assumptions.
You call this snow?
I live in the Great Lakes region of the US (where we get more than 200 cm of snow per year)and am in Paris on sabbatical. I was amazed to see that the roads are not plowed, nor is salt or sand used. Back home this is simply a nuisance storm. The fact that Ile de France shut down because of a few snowflakes is disgraceful. It seems like just another excuse not to go to work.
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