Fresh snowfalls heaped further misery on parts of Europe on Wednesday, closing airports and schools and disrupting road and rail links notably in Britain and France. As overnight snow and plummetting temperatures brought a recent thaw to a halt, British business leaders said the worst winter in decades is costing the country hundreds of millions of pounds a day.
In the latest disruption to air transport, London's Gatwick airport was closed for snow clearance until 1600 GMT - notably delaying an emergency rescue team heading for Haiti after a devastating earthquake there. London Heathrow reported the cancellation of 84 mostly short-haul inbound and outbound flights.
"Our airfield team is working round the clock to keep both runways clear but the threat of further snow and ice at the airport remains," the world's busiest international passenger air hub said. London City, Birmingham, Cardiff and Southampton airports reopened following closure. There was similar disruption for air travellers in France. In Paris, 40 percent of all flights from the main Charles de Gaulle airport were cancelled due to snow and sleet showers, while half of flights were scrapped at Orly. Regional airports across France were also forced to close or reduce traffic because of snow.
French road authorities issued a ban against heavy commercial road traffic from midnight until noon on Wednesday in eight departments around Paris as the winter storm dumped three to five centimetres of snow across northern France. More than 4,000 trucks were forced to park west of the capital region. Eurostar rail services between Britain and continental Europe were "running a near-normal service".
Two trains from London to Brussels, one from London to Paris and the same numbers in the opposite directions were not running, though customers with tickets had seats reserved for them on the next train. In Britain, the Federation of Small Businesses estimated that the bad weather was costing the economy at least 600 million pounds (975 million dollars, 670 million euros) a day.
"Small businesses have been particularly hard-hit during the recent bad weather, with staff unable to make it to work because of school closures and snowbound roads," said FSB chairman John Wright. In Germany, one of the countries worst hit by the big freeze, temperatures were reaching minus six degrees Celsius, with fresh snow in the south, while some secondary roads in the north were still blocked.
Switzerland's main publicly owned salt works said that it had turned down new orders from the snowbound Netherlands and Germany in order to cater for booming domestic needs. "The situation is so fragile that we can't take the risk of delivering abroad," said Armin Roos, sales manager at Schweizer Rheinsalinen. "We're running round the clock." In Iberia, temperatures were on the rise again in Spain, but nearly all of Portugal was put on orange alert for high winds and heavy rain expected Wednesday.
A month of heavy rainfall has seen nearly all the country's dam reservoirs fill up, with the Alqueva dam reaching its maximum capacity for the first time since it opened in 2002, forming Europe's biggest artificial lake. Parts of Balkans have been hit by flooding caused by downpours. In Montenegro, a hippo was found wandering in village of Plavnica on Lake Skadar after flooding at a private zoo led him to escape from his pen.