Europe Waiting Out the Big Chill

By Thomas A. Sancton

Soviet tanks pulled stranded motorists out of six-foot snowdrifts along the Vienna-Budapest highway. Daredevil Parisians skied down the snow-blanketed steps of Montmartre's Sacre-Coeur Basilica. Big Ben's famous chime was reduced to a dull thud as its bell hammer froze. Packs of hungry wolves emerged from the mountains to roam through isolated Czechoslovak villages in search of food. Across Europe last week, wind-whipped masses of frigid Siberian air, often accompanied by heavy snowstorms, sent thermometers plunging to some of the lowest levels of the past quarter of a century, paralyzing transportation, closing schools, businesses and government offices, and causing more than 264 deaths. Summing up the chaos, the London Standard proclaimed: TODAY IS CANCELLED!

Hardest hit was the Soviet Union, where a total of 77 people have died in weather-related incidents since early January. Soviet news reports attributed 48 of those casualties to fires, most of them caused by defective heaters. An additional 29 people were crushed under avalanches in the Georgian republic. Temperatures in Leningrad dropped to -31 degrees F, the lowest reading there since meteorological data were first kept in 1743. In Moscow, where the thermometer hit -32 degrees, the city's residents burned twice their normal daily average of gas and fuel oil and overworked heating systems failed in many apartment buildings.

The arctic blast stunned eastern and central Europe. Thirty-one weather- related deaths were reported in Poland, 20 in Hungary and 5 in Austria. Along the snowbound, 170-mile highway linking Budapest with Vienna, more than 130 cars were immobilized for up to 18 hours until Soviet, Hungarian and Austrian tanks dug them out. One of the liberated motorists was Austria's Ambassador to Hungary, Arthur Agstner. Declared the grateful diplomat: "If the Soviet tanks had not arrived in time, several of us could have frozen to death."

In Britain, where at least 37 people perished in record low temperatures, snow drifts up to ten feet high cut off towns and villages in the counties of Kent and Surrey. A rare heavy snowfall forced the closing of major highway and rail links to Scotland and the Lake District. British Rail was forced to cancel all but 3% of its commuter trains to and from the capital. Warned a blunt notice at London's Charing Cross station: "There is very little chance of anyone reaching their intended destination and even less chance of them getting back again."

The government mobilized the army for emergency relief operations. Personnel carriers ferried supplies to snowbound regions, and army helicopters flew pregnant women to hospitals to have their babies. In London, where temperatures dipped as low as 16 degrees, churches opened their doors to the homeless. Officials at the London zoo locked the lions inside cages for fear they would escape from their enclosures by walking across a frozen moat.

Temperatures in Paris dropped to 10 degrees. At midweek a 5 1/2-inch snowfall turned the French capital into a winter fantasy land where students waged impromptu snowball fights and cross-country skiers trekked across the Champs de Mars near the Eiffel Tower. Following the lead of President Francois Mitterrand, who deployed army troops to stricken areas across the country, French Premier Jacques Chirac mobilized some 1,800 soldiers to help remove the snow from Paris streets. The government ordered two Paris Metro stations to stay open all night to help shelter an estimated 15,000 homeless men and women. The weather was even more severe in other regions. The town of Mouthe, in the eastern Jura mountain area, was caught in a record -27 degrees, while the winegrowing Burgundy region in the southwest posted -7 degrees. The Mediterranean port of Marseilles was hit with heavy snow and winds of up to 60 m.p.h. In some areas heating oil ran out when delivery trucks were unable to get through because low-grade diesel fuel had frozen in their gas tanks.

Although conditions were less harsh in France than in some other parts of Europe, the cold snap there caused a death toll of at least 31. One potential French victim of the cold was saved in the northern city of Amiens when a vagrant discovered a newborn girl abandoned at the city dump. He called for help, and the girl was rushed to the hospital. Doctors rated her chances of survival excellent and named her Violette because of her purplish complexion when she was first brought in.

Italy was also hit by the brutal winter blitz. In Venice pigeons pecked vainly for bread crumbs on the white-mantled Piazza San Marco, and blankets of snow decked the prows of unused gondolas. The southern regions were battered by gale-force winds that transformed the Naples waterfront into a tangle of wrecked boats and knocked out power lines in Sardinia. Throughout Italy weather conditions caused at least six deaths and several billion dollars' worth of property damage.

The countries of northern Europe, more accustomed to harsh winters, suffered fewer casualties than their southern neighbors. West Germany reported five deaths. The four Scandinavian countries together reported a total of five exposure-related deaths. Nonetheless, the chill caused severe hardships. More than half of Denmark's 200 inhabited islands were cut off from the mainland. Icebreakers had to work day and night to free some 15 vessels from the frozen sound between Denmark and Sweden. Following a blizzard in the Swedish province of Skane, where temperatures dipped to -11 degrees, people were warned that they risked death if they ventured outdoors.

Although the mercury rose slightly at week's end, weathermen predicted a new plunge in temperatures and warned that there was no relief in sight from the harshest winter in recent memory. One almost certain result: a hike in the cost of oil on both sides of the Atlantic as the sudden European demand drives up prices in world markets.

With reporting by William Dowell/Paris and Steven Holmes/London, with other bureaus