European airlines cancel hundreds of flights as snow chaos worsens – National

More flights will be canceled, trains will be delayed and roads will be blocked by snow. Europe In the coming days, the cold snap is expected to worsen, leading to even heavier snowfall after several days of travel disruptions.

Dutch authorities on Wednesday asked people to plan to stay at home if possible, as a new snowstorm is expected to arrive overnight.

French Transport Minister Philippe Tabarot said Tuesday that airlines had already been ordered to cancel at least 40% of flights at Paris’ main Charles de Gaulle airport the next morning, and a quarter of flights at Orly.

Public transport in the Paris region will probably also be disrupted by the snow, he added.

At Schiphol in Amsterdam, where more than 400 flights were canceled on Tuesday, authorities asked travelers whose flights had been canceled to stay away from the airport to avoid overcrowding.

“We haven’t experienced such extreme weather conditions for years,” Dutch airline KLM spokeswoman Anoesjka Aspeslagh said, as winter weather paralyzed traffic at one of Europe’s main transit hubs for the fifth day.

The airline later announced it would cancel an additional 600 flights on Wednesday at Schiphol Airport, where KLM is the main operator.

Stranded at Schiphol, Simiao Sun said she feared spending her 40th birthday in transit. She was told she would have to wait three days to get a rescheduled flight to Beijing.

“My child would miss school and we would both miss work, so I’m waiting in line here…hoping to get a flight a little earlier.”

KLM said it was offering alternative flights where possible and doing everything it could to help travelers, but it was “overwhelmed with requests.”

Current trend

• “An Unstable White House”: What Shaped Responses to the US Attack in Venezuela?

• Chrystia Freeland will leave her post as an MP and accept the position of Zelensky’s advisor

Additionally, all national rail services in the Netherlands were suspended on Tuesday morning after a computer outage on the rail network. Trains began running in parts of the country after 0900 GMT, but problems persisted around Amsterdam, with high-speed Eurostar services from Amsterdam to Paris canceled or delayed.

French roads were gradually being cleared on Tuesday after snow caused serious accidents across the country, killing at least five people, according to the BFMTV news channel. Traffic in the Paris region reached a record 1,000 kilometers of traffic jams on Monday evening.

In Germany, temperatures fell well below minus 10 degrees Celsius (14 degrees Fahrenheit) in the south and east early Tuesday. Much of the country was covered in snow.

In Britain, the Weather Bureau said winter hazards could persist throughout the week in most of the country. Temperatures overnight on Tuesday fell as low as -12.5 degrees Celsius in Marham, Norfolk, eastern England, marking the coldest night of the winter so far.

Heavy snow and rain also wreaked havoc in the Western Balkans, closing roads, cutting power and causing rivers to flood. A woman died on Monday in Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital, after a tree loaded with wet snow fell on her.