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posted by on Wednesday January 11 2017, @10:59PM   Printer-friendly
from the bone-chilling dept.

The BBC reports:

At least 10 people died of cold in Poland. Night temperatures in Russia plunged to minus 30C.

Normally milder Greece has witnessed temperatures of minus 15C in the north where an Afghan migrant died of cold last week and roads were closed.

In Athens, the temperature failed to rise above 0C and several of the islands were covered in snow.

BBC Weather report about why the cold is so intense.

CBC reports:

The extreme winter weather that has gripped Europe in the past days has caused more than a dozen deaths, left villages cut off, caused power and water outages, frozen rivers and lakes, grounded flights and led to road accidents. Serbia's authorities on Sunday banned river traffic on its stretch of the Danube — one of Europe's main rivers — because of ice and strong wind.

[...] In Italy, eight deaths were blamed on the cold, including a man who died in the basement of an unused building in Milan, and another one on a street flanking Florence's Arno River. [Pope] Francis asked God to "warm our hearts so we'll help" the homeless.


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  • (Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday January 12 2017, @04:19AM

    by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Thursday January 12 2017, @04:19AM (#452840) Journal

    Meanwhile around Atlanta GA, schools were kept closed on Monday and Tuesday after a Saturday morning sleet storm because there were still a handful of icy patches on the roads that the local DOTs somehow could not deal with even though most of the roads had thawed and dried by noon Saturday! "Because you cant be too safe!!!!1!!11" Kept the talking heads on TV busy.

    To be fair, does anyone remember the ice/freezing rain/sleet event in Atlanta three years ago [wikipedia.org]? At the time, there were thousands of cars stranded on the roads, they had to call out the National Guard to bring them to shelters, had to set up emergency overnight shelters all over the city, etc.

    People in the South aren't prepared for winter weather. Ever. I have no idea what the road conditions were actually like earlier this week down there, but things like this tend to go in 10-15 year cycles, I think. Major winter weather event happens in Southern city. (Well, not serious by Northern standards, but enough to cripple a city without salt or plows or drivers who have any clue what to do.) Terrible stuff happens. Everyone overreacts for several years afterward. Cities purchase snowplows and piles of salt when they never had it before.

    Then after 5-10 years, everyone gets criticized for overreacting. The snowplows are sold off. The salt is gradually used up whenever it can be (to show the expenditure was worth it!) in a few days with flurries. Then, in a few years, another serious weather event happens, but they have no way to deal with it... and the cycle repeats. I've never lived in Atlanta, but I'm familiar with ice events that have happened in other Southern cities, so what you're probably seeing now is probably the "overcautious" stage. In about 5-7 years, there will be a serious school bus crash or something when they don't call off school because everyone forgets what happened in 2014.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 12 2017, @02:04PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 12 2017, @02:04PM (#452935)

    To be fair, does anyone remember the ice/freezing rain/sleet event in Atlanta three years ago? At the time, there were thousands of cars stranded on the roads, they had to call out the National Guard to bring them to shelters, had to set up emergency overnight shelters all over the city, etc

    And everyone north of the Mason-Dixon Line mocked them relentlessly for the rest of the year. Even other southern states were like "Really?"