Six lives claimed as second snowstorm hits Europe

EUROPE’S second snowstorm this week piled drifts on tracks and roads yesterday, slowing rail service, stranding motorists and causing hundreds of traffic accidents. At least six deaths were attributed to a week of icy weather.

A British couple on their way back from Eurodisney died yesterday when their car overturned in wintry conditions on a French motorway, police said.

The man, aged 36, and woman, 39, from Stafford, were believed to be going at around 200kph (120mph).

They were travelling on the A26 towards Calais when they lost control of the car and it spun on to its roof.

“They died instantly,” a spokesman for the motorway police said.

Swirling snow and thick fog enveloped most of Italy, and Florence recorded nearly 10 inches of snow - the most it has seen in two decades. Temperatures in northern Italy dropped as low as -17 Celsius (1.4 Fahrenheit) and a 22-year-old homeless man was found dead, apparently of exposure, in Rome’s main railway station on Wednesday.

Sixty vehicles piled up on icy asphalt on Hungary’s busiest highway, injuring 11 people.

Police said the accident closed the interstate M1 connecting Budapest with Vienna. One child’s condition was life-threatening, police said.

Two people died in France, apparently of exposure. Authorities in the city of Le Mans reported the death of a 52-year-old woman on welfare who slept in a garden shed, and a homeless man was reported dead in Lyon.

In Poland, heavy snowfall blocked roads in the Katowice and Bielsko-Biala area in the south and blanketed the Baltic coastal city of Gdansk, causing traffic jams.

To the west, swirling, drifting snow led Czech authorities to contemplate closing several border crossings into Poland.

In Switzerland, temperatures plummeted to -35.9 Celsius (-32.6 Fahrenheit) in La Brevine in the Jura mountains in the country’s coldest temperature this year.

In Britain, the mercury moved upward after days of sub-freezing weather and heavy snow was forecast to turn into rain later today.

But temperatures as low as -12 Celsius (10.4 Fahrenheit) earlier in the week caused the death of a man in his 40s in the West Midlands town of West Bromwich.