Fears for migrants as winter weather takes its grip
Print Edition
BLIZZARDS and dangerously low temperatures persisted in parts of Europe yesterday. In Serbia, aid workers scrambled to help hundreds of migrants sleeping rough in parks and makeshift shelters.
The extreme weather has caused more than a dozen deaths, left villages cut off, caused power and water outages, frozen rivers and lakes, and grounded flights.
Two men died of cold in Poland on Saturday, bringing the nation’s death toll from the weather to 55 since November 1, authorities said. Temperatures dropped to minus 30 degrees Celsius in the mountains of southern Poland.
In Italy, eight deaths were blamed on the cold, including a man who died in the basement of a building in Milan, and another one on a street near Florence’s Arno River.
In Belgrade, Serbia’s capital, several hundred men, mostly from Afghanistan and Pakistan, remained in an abandoned warehouse by the city’s bus station, where aid organizations distributed heaters, blankets, clothes and food in an attempt to keep them warm.
While most of the several thousand migrants in Serbia have stayed in asylum centers, hundreds have refused to do so, looking for ways to move on toward western Europe.
In Bulgaria, police said two men from Iraq and a Somali woman died from cold in mountains near Turkey as they tried to make their way to Europe. Many in the Belgrade warehouse were sick after days of extreme cold.
Elsewhere, dozens of villages in Serbia’s remote southwestern Pestar region were sealed off by snow, prompting the evacuation of some 100 people. Numerous villages in northern Bulgaria were left without electricity and water. Power outages were reported throughout the region.
Temperatures of between minus 15 and minus 26 degrees Celsius saw ice forming on the Adriatic Sea and the Danube.
Police in Bulgaria said a passenger train derailed yesterday after it hit a pile of snow.
Four Portuguese nationals were killed when a bus skidded on an icy road in eastern France.
Black ice across north and west Germany caused countless accidents — firefighters in Hamburg dealt with 415 incidents over the weekend.
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