MOSCOW (Reuters) – Heavy snowfalls have buried Moscow in huge snowdrifts, disrupting transport, delaying flights and making it difficult for pedestrians facing strong winds and temperatures of less than 15 Celsius (5 Fahrenheit).
The blizzard started on Thursday night and is expected to end on Sunday. Russia’s emergency service advised people to stay away from trees, warning of gusts of 18 meters per second (40 mph). “It is a real snowstorm, a snow Armageddon, a snow apocalypse. This is not a practice alert, but a combat alert,” said Evgeny Tishkovets of the Fobos weather service, quoted by the RIA news agency, before the snow starts.
Early Saturday, the depth of snow in the city reached 56 centimeters (22 inches), said Fobos. That almost surpassed the record of 60 cm of snow accumulated on February 13, he said.
On Friday, Moscow saw a record blizzard on February 12, breaking the previous record set for the date in 1973, according to Russian news agencies citing the national weather service.
There have been several flight delays at airports in Moscow, a city with more than 12 million inhabitants. Exceptionally for a weekend, traffic was congested in many places.
Some 60,000 people were working to clean the streets, said the Moscow mayor’s office.
(Reporting by Lev Sergeev and Aleksander Reshetnikov; Writing by Andrey Ostroukh; Editing by Frances Kerry)