More flights will be canceled, trains will run late and roads will be blocked by snow across Europe in coming days as a cold snap is expected to worsen, bringing even more heavy snowfall after several days of travel disruption.
Authorities in the Netherlands told people to plan to stay at home if at all possible on Wednesday, with a fresh blizzard expected to arrive overnight.
French Transportation Minister Philippe Tabarot said on Tuesday that airlines had already been ordered to cancel at least 40% of flights at Paris’s main Charles de Gaulle airport the following morning, and a quarter of flights at smaller Orly.
Public transportation in the Paris region will probably also be disrupted by the snow, he added.
At Amsterdam’s Schiphol, where more than 400 flights were canceled on Tuesday, authorities told travelers whose flights had been called off to stay away from the airport to prevent overcrowding.
“We haven’t experienced such extreme weather conditions in years,” Dutch airline KLM’s spokesperson Anoesjka Aspeslagh said, as winter weather crippled traffic at one of Europe’s main transit hubs for a fifth day.
The airline later announced it will cancel an additional 600 flights on Wednesday at Schiphol airport, where KLM is the main operator.
Stranded at Schiphol, Simiao Sun said she feared she’d spend her 40th birthday in transit. She had been told she would have to wait three days for a rescheduled flight to Beijing.
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“My child would miss school and we would both miss work, so I’m queuing here…hoping to get a slightly earlier flight.”
KLM said it was offering alternative flights where possible and doing everything to help travelers, but it was “overwhelmed with inquiries.”
On top of that, all domestic rail services in the Netherlands were suspended early on Tuesday after an IT outage hit 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 either canceled or late.
Roads in France were gradually clearing on Tuesday after snow caused severe accidents all over the country, killing at least five people, according to BFMTV news station. Traffic in the Paris area hit a record 1,000 kilometers of jams on Monday evening.
SNOW FALLS OVER LARGE PARTS OF GERMANY AND FRANCE
In Germany, temperatures fell well below minus 10 degrees Celsius (14 degrees Fahrenheit) in the south and east early on Tuesday. Much of the country was covered in snow.
In Britain, the Meteorological Office said winter weather hazards could continue throughout the week for most of the country. Temperatures overnight to Tuesday had fallen as low as -12.5 degrees Celsius in Marham, Norfolk, in east England, marking the coldest night of the winter so far.
Heavy snow and rain have also caused havoc across the Western Balkans, closing roads, cutting power and causing rivers to flood. A woman died in the Bosnian capital Sarajevo on Monday after a tree overburdened with wet snow fell on her.