Travel woes
December 22, 2009
Cold weather and heavy snowfall could not have come at a worse time in Europe, where thousands of holiday travelers have been stranded by train and flight cancellations.
Frankfurt Airport, the third busiest in Europe, was closed for about four hours Monday night due to icy runways, stranding about 8,000 passengers. It reopened on Tuesday but passengers still experienced delays and cancellations.
Berlin’s Tegel Airport was also briefly closed on Tuesday amid freezing rain with some flights being temporarily diverted to the capital's Schoenefeld airport. Airports in London, Milan and Duesseldorf have also experienced closures.
Apart from travel, authorities have blamed cold weather for at least 90 deaths in Europe, including 42 in Poland, many of them homeless men, and 27 in Ukraine. Six people have been killed in accidents in Germany and three in Austria.
Channel Tunnel reopens
Perhaps the most dramatic of all the weather-related travel woes took place under the English Channel, where train malfunctions in the Channel Tunnel brought services to a halt on Friday. Some 2,000 passengers were stuck for up to 15 hours in five stricken trains overnight.
Train company Eurostar was able to run two out of every three scheduled trains under the English Channel on Tuesday as some of the 75,000 stranded passengers finally made it across the sea.
"We have been pretty successful in clearing the backlog of passengers who have been waiting to travel since both Saturday and Sunday," said Eurostar chief executive Richard Brown at a news conference in London.
Some passengers holding tickets from Monday were allowed to travel on Tuesday, and Brown said he hoped to run a more complete service on Wednesday.
He also said full Eurostar service was unlikely to resume until after Christmas, and the company has suspended further ticket sales until that time.
Independent review to look into chaos
Eurostar has blamed the train breakdowns on condensation that built up in the engines when the trains moved from the cool air in France to the warmer air in the tunnel.
"It [the extreme weather] has been a test for our trains that they haven't passed," Brown told Sky News television. "We need to look at how to modify them for the future."
Hoping to get some answers, Eurostar is to launch an investigation into why train services failed and how passengers were treated while they were trapped inside the Channel Tunnel.
"Why after 15 years of really good running suddenly did we hit this problem?" said Christopher Garnett, co-director of the review. "We plan to try to get our report out by the end of January – we need to move quickly."
acb/msh/Reuters/AFP/AP/dpa
Editor: Chuck Penfold