By Calvin Palmer
Much of Britain lay in the icy grip of Arctic conditions today with a forecast of blizzards and heavy snow for the rest of the week, with a further six inches to one foot of snow expected in the next 24 hours.
More than six million people were forced to stay at home after almost a foot of snow fell in some parts of the country. The Met Office said that it was the most widespread snowfall for 18 years.
With at least 2,000 schools closed and rail, road and air transport paralyzed, the disruption is expected to cost the economy £1.2 billion ($1.7 billion). Airlines alone could face a £10 million ($14.2 million) bill from cancelled flights.
Parts of Northumberland and North Yorkshire could be left with 16 ins of snow by tomorrow, while the rest of the country will have up to one foot, the Met Office has warned.
Snow is forecast across the country until Friday, although the flurries will become less severe and turn to sleet as the week draws to a close.
With these conditions comes tragedy. A mountain rescue team searching for two brothers missing on Snowdon found two bodies. The brothers, from Weston-super-Mare, are believed to have been caught without ice axes or crampons as the weather closed in last night on the mountain range in North Wales.
In Redditch, Worcestershire, a teenage boy was treated for hypothermia after falling into an icy lake.
Emergency services are being stretched and London Ambulance has announced that it will only respond to life threatening emergencies after dealing with 650 calls in seven hours overnight.
The North Downs and the Pennines were worst hit making roads impassable and crippling some of the busiest rail routes in the country.
The satellite navigation maker TomTom measured one traffic jam on the M25 around London as 54 miles long, stretching from Watford to Reigate.
With the entire fleet of London buses out of action, and services on all but one Tube line severely curtailed, a handful of commuters took to skiing through the streets of London.
London mayor Boris Johnson later suspended the city’s congestion charge as a gesture of thanks to workers who were trying to keep the capital moving.
Thousands of airline passengers were stranded at airports including Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, Southampton, Luton, Leeds Bradford and London City after snow forced the closure of runways and the cancellation of hundreds of flights.
Passengers arriving back from skiing holidays were bemused to find themselves virtually stranded because of snow.
Schools in Essex, Surrey, Kent, North Yorkshire, East Riding, London, Birmingham, the West Midlands and East Anglia were closed.
Some of Britain’s busiests roads and motorways were partially closed by accidents including several jack-knifed lorries. They included the M25 around London, the M1 in Northamptonshire, the A1(M) at Leeds, the M3 in Hampshire, the A3 in Surrey, and the A66 in Cumbria.
On the railways, all Southeastern trains in and out of London from Kent and Sussex were suspended, busy South West Trains routes were down to one train every two hours. First Great Western services from the South West were unable to proceed beyond Reading in Berkshire.
Meanwhile as many as 20,000 people planning to travel to and from the Continent by rail suffered disruption as Eurostar staff struggled to get to work.
A Eurostar spokesman said earlier trains had run normally but staff were now unable to get to work so trains were subject to delay and cancellation. “We would advise passengers to stay at home and check the Web site,” she said.
The village of Middleton-in-Teesdale, in County Durham, was under six inches of snow. Carol Mitchell, the village Post Mistress said although the snow had made life difficult for many people living there, the “Dunkirk spirit was kicking in”.
“It has been bad today,” she said. “It is snowing hard and the forecast says there is more to come. But it is amazing how many people are out and helping.”
It would be interesting to know just how many people in Britain still know what the “Dunkirk Spirit” means.
[Based on reports by The Daily Telegraph, The Independent and The Times.]
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