Bitter weather continues in Europe


Severe cold weather conditions across Europe are continuing to disrupt travel plans for thousands of people over the Christmas holiday season, with snow and ice forcing air, rail and road closures.
Easyjet cancelled 180 flights on Tuesday, while Ryanair and British Airways warned of delays and cancellations due to heavy snow and freezing temperatures.


Eurostar resumed a partial rail service between Britain and France, after a three-day suspension stranded hundreds of passengers and cancelled the journeys of around 50,000 people.

Weather forecasters are expecting snow to continue falling in the UK, northern France and the Netherlands.
Winter storms across the continent have led to at least 90 deaths in recent days, including 42 mostly homeless people in Poland, where temperatures have plunged to minus 20 degrees Celsius.
Long queues
The travel chaos began on Friday and Saturday when five Eurostar trains broke down, trapping more than 2,000 passengers inside.

Rory Challands, Al Jazeera's correspondent at the Eurostar terminal in London's Kings Cross station, said queues for the resumed service on Tuesday were "stretching around the lounges" and appeared to be growing longer.
"Those travelling on Eurostar today are not people with tickets to travel today but those who were supposed to be travelling on Saturday and Sunday."
Ian Nunn, a senior Eurostar executive, told Al Jazeera: "People are bearing with us. We are doing our level best to deal with the backlog.
"We are asking people to only turn up if they have tickets for Saturday or Sunday. The priority is to deal with passengers who are stranded and have been so for two or three days.
"[To our passengers] we say sorry. We are refunding tickets and trying to be practical."
'Big inconvenience'
Warsaw, Poland's capital, has suffered temperatures of -15C below average, while Russia has also been feeling its heaviest snow of the season.
Temperatures are expected to rise on Thursday, with westerly wind chills dropping and central European temperatures increasing by 5 or 6C.
Some airports, including Frankfurt, are beginning to allow aircraft to take off, but flight disruptions are expected to continue.
Flights have been cancelled in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal  and Spain and main highways were blocked across Europe where some regions had more than 50cm of snow.
Al Jazeera's Challands said the weather "is not looking to get any better any time soon".
"Mostly people are trying to get back for Christmas to see their families, so it is a big inconveniece for them."
The French government has said that it will investigate the breakdown of Eurostar trains, which they believe may be due to more than the unusually dry snow sucked into train engines the firm has blamed.
 Source:Al Jazeera and agencies

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Assassins Creed Bloodlines JPN PSP

Image
Assassins Creed Bloodlines JPN PSP | 244 MB Assassins Creed Bloodlines has the player follow Altair's story right after the events of Assassin's Creed as he discovers a new land and hunts down the ascending Templars. As the Templars withdraw from the Holy Land after Altair kills Robert De Sable, the Assassin follows them to the island of Cyprus. Finding new allies and enemies, Altair helps the local resistance against the Templar occupation and strikes down the ascendant Templar commanders. Continue Altair's story and find the missing link between Assassin's Creed and Assassin's Creed 2. You can free-run and climb anywhere - a real technology breakthrough and a first on PSP - and you can connect with PS3 to unlock exclusive material on each console. Homepage:- UBisoft RELEASE Information: Title: Assassin's Creed - Bloodlines Country: Japan Languages: Japanese Release Date: 2009/12/23 System: PlayStation Portable Format: iso Filename: b-asciij
Read more

Global temperatures 'could rise 6C'

Image
Scientists have warned that global temperatures could rise by six degrees Celsius by the end of the century, four degrees higher than previously predicted and at a level that could wipe out species and cause widespread natural disasters. In addition, the study by the Global Carbon Project (GCP) said on Wednesday, that the ability of the world's forests and oceans to absorb carbon emissions was declining. The paper, published in the journal  Nature Geoscience , comes in the run up to UN talks in Copenhagen, Denmark, aimed at crafting a pact to combat climate change from 2013. It said pollution "continued to track the average of the most carbon-intensive family of scenarios" put forward by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Extreme scenario Professor Corinne Le Quéré, the lead author of the study from the British Antarctic Survey, said: "The projections of climate that have been made before are always based on scenarios of climate
Read more

Floods ravage storm-hit El Salvador

Image
At least 124 people have been killed by floods and mudslides in El Salvador after the central American nation was battered by Hurricane Ida. Humberto Centeno, the country's interior minister, said on Monday that the toll was likely to rise since dozens of people were still missing. "There are 60 people missing in just the province of San Vicente ... we have been through disaster zones, including a fly-over of Verapaz [in San Vicente], it is a real tragedy there." The capital city San Salvador was hit hardest, with 61 people reported dead after mudslides buried homes, according to the Red Cross. A spokesman for the aid agency, Carlos López Mendoza, said most of the victims were buried by mudslides or swept away by raging rivers. And Ernesto Zelayandia, the deputy interior minister said a river in Verapaz had overflowed its banks and swamped 300 homes. Marcela Mayen, a journalist with Channel 6 El Salvador, told Al Jazeera: "The problem here is that there are many rive
Read more