SHARE
COPY LINK

WEATHER

Reinfeldt dismayed by transport freeze

Swedish prime minster Fredrik Reinfeldt has expressed disappointment at the inability of the country's infrastructure to cope with snow and cold weather. "Winter is after all one of the four seasons in this country," he pointed out on Monday.

Reinfeldt dismayed by transport freeze

Freezing temperatures and record snowfalls caused transportation chaos for travellers in Sweden again on Monday, while the threat of collapsing buildings forced a number of schools to close.

Around one in three Swedish trains was cancelled, including all traffic on the busy Stockholm-Gothenburg route, while most other trains were delayed, Ulf Wallin, a spokesman for Sweden’s state rail company SJ, told AFP.

“Things are obviously not going well,” he said. “I would say probably 100,000 people have been affected by this.”

Delays and cancellations have plagued the rails ever since abnormally cold temperatures arrived at the start of the year, with the mercury below freezing across Sweden and dropping as low as minus 40 Celsius in the north.

In Stockholm, where temperatures lingered around minus 15 Celsius on Monday, all subway lines above ground were halted, as the local mass transport company SL scrambled to lay on replacement buses.

“I came out here at 6:45 am to try to get on a bus, but they all just sped past since they were already overcrowded when they got here,” Helene Ulman Lilja, 29, told AFP in the Stockholm suburb of Bagarmossen.

“We live in Sweden. You would think that a little snow and cold would be an easy thing to handle,” she said.

Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt tended to agree.

“I understand that people are irritated…. Winter is after all one of the four seasons in this country and we have to ask ourselves why we haven’t been able to handle the situation better,” he told the domestic TT news agency.

Snow blocking the rails and ice and cold freezing the outdoor switches are the main problems affecting both the long-distance trains and the subways.

“There has just been so much snow and the cold has lasted so long that the switches are not working properly,” Wallin said.

The trains themselves were also seeing more damage due to the drawn-out cold spell.

“There are long lines to all of our repair shops,” he said.

Many schools and daycare centres, as well as a large shopping centre, were closed on Monday due to the risk that heavy snow and ice could cause the buildings to collapse, according to the TT news agency.

A police helicopter was also surveying possible roof damage to a building adjoined to the Gothenburg central station, TT said.

A number of buildings have collapsed across Sweden in recent days and several people have been killed and injured.

Member comments

Log in here to leave a comment.
Become a Member to leave a comment.

WEATHER

Denmark records deepest snow level for 13 years

Blizzards in Denmark this week have resulted in the greatest depth of snow measured in the country for 13 years.

Denmark records deepest snow level for 13 years

A half-metre of snow, measured at Hald near East Jutland town Randers, is the deepest to have occurred in Denmark since January 2011, national meteorological agency DMI said.

The measurement was taken by the weather agency at 8am on Thursday.

Around 20-30 centimetres of snow was on the ground across most of northern and eastern Jutland by Thursday, as blizzards peaked resulting in significant disruptions to traffic and transport.

A much greater volume of snow fell in 2011, however, when over 100 centimetres fell on Baltic Sea island Bornholm during a post-Christmas blizzard, which saw as much as 135 centimetres on Bornholm at the end of December 2010.

READ ALSO: Denmark’s January storms could be fourth extreme weather event in three months

With snowfall at its heaviest for over a decade, Wednesday saw a new rainfall record. The 59 millimetres which fell at Svendborg on the island of Funen was the most for a January day in Denmark since 1886. Some 9 weather stations across Funen and Bornholm measured over 50cm of rain.

DMI said that the severe weather now looks to have peaked.

“We do not expect any more weather records to be set in the next 24 hours. But we are looking at some very cold upcoming days,” DMI meteorologist and press spokesperson Herdis Damberg told news wire Ritzau.

SHOW COMMENTS