BB FANS

Telegraph
By Fiona Govan
(Filed: 26/12/2005)

Severe weather warnings were issued yesterday for areas across Britain as heavy snow and freezing fog were forecast.

Motorists have been warned to take extra care and avoid venturing out on the roads unless "absolutely necessary".

The Met Office warning said that snow showers were expected to develop over eastern parts of Britain today and would become "heavy and prolonged in places" with up to 6in (15cm) falling overnight.

"There is potential for several centimetres of snow to occur widely, with Kent and parts of East Anglia most vulnerable to the heavier falls," it said.

Forecasters put the probability of disruption due to severe weather within the next four days at 80 per cent in some parts of the country.

A spokesman for the Met Office said: "It's going to be quite a change. Most of the country experienced a fine, sunny Christmas Day but by Boxing Day evening there will be a cold wind blowing from the north-east bringing snow showers across much of the South East.

"It is going to feel a lot colder over the next few days, not just because of the freezing temperatures but because of the wind-chill."

The North West, Northern Ireland, eastern Wales and the lowlands of central Scotland will escape snowfall but will continue to experience patches of freezing fog.

"There will be patches of freezing fog that will be slow to clear causing all sorts of problems on the road," the spokesman said. "The snow, depending on how it settles, has the potential to cause major disruption."

Thick fog has already been responsible for causing a 26-car motorway pile-up. The accident, which happened on the M62 in Cheshire on Christmas Eve, left one women seriously injured and five others needing hospital treatment.

In a separate incident a young man was killed when his car skidded off the road and hit a tree. The 25-year-old, from Wimborne in Dorset, was driving to his parents home on Christmas Eve when his Nissan coupe spun out of control. He died at the scene.

The Highways Agency and the Met Office issued a joint warning to motorists of continuing hazardous driving conditions.

The agency said it was gritting roads where icy conditions had been forecast and advised drivers to travel only if absolutely necessary.

The Times
December 27, 2005
by Ross Clark

I MAY TURN out to be horribly wrong. You may wake this morning to see your neighbour’s chimney pot poking from a glacial landscape. The M1 may be buried beneath 6ft-drifts, the odd motorist foolhardy enough to venture out may be encased in a block of ice, from which his corpse has to be chipped sometime in January.

If so your copy of The Times is unlikely to reach you and I may get away with it in any case. But for the moment I am confident that the great Boxing Night snowstorm of 2005, predicted in all newspapers yesterday, is yet another meteorological scare story which turns out to be damp squib. I have grave suspicions that the police’s advice for us to abandon our journeys unless they are “absolutely necessary” is just a ploy for PCs to extend their holidays. Frighten us into staying at home, they figure, and they needn’t bother going out on patrol: they can stay in their police stations and play with their new Xboxes instead.

What is supposed to be so dangerous about driving in the snow in any case? On the regrettably few occasions that I have found myself caught in a car during a snowstorm it has been a delightful experience. Even the morons who normally tailgate me at 70mph are forced to creep along at a speed at which, should they have a prang, may dent my bumper but won’t break my neck. I am rather fed up with reading the headline, every time a few snowflakes land on the British Isles, “ Blizzards kill three”, accompanied by a round-up of every fatal road accident that day. An average of ten people die on the roads every day, so if only three people are killed on a snowy day the headline should more accurately read: “Blizzards save seven lives”.

True, several thousand motorists were stranded on the M11 three years ago as a result of a light snowfall. But that was hardly the weather’s fault. Had the police and the Highways Agency spent a little less time telling people not to travel and a little more time organising their gritters and snowploughs, as much colder countries seem to manage, it wouldn’t have happened. It is a good job our police chiefs are not seconded to Canada. You can just imagine the headlines every springtime thaw: “Family found starved because they heeded police advice not to venture out into the snow.”

27 Dec 2005

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From DeadBrain

I mind when I lived in London - at the merest flake of snow on the ground the entire London transport system seemed to close down

Scotland is bracing itself for more wintry weather after snow caused problems for motorists and air travellers in parts of the north east.

Overnight blizzards caused Aberdeen Airport to shut its runway for more than an hour while teams cleared snow.

An inbound British Airways flight from Heathrow had to be diverted to Glasgow and other services were also delayed.

Some roads were closed in Grampian and it is thought that the wintry weather played a part in a number of accidents.

These included a crash which involved a lorry and three cars near Inverurie.

Forecasters warned that the snow was expected to spread across the rest of the country overnight.

Scotland's ski centres said they were bracing themselves for a busy weekend.

Aviemore was the coldest part of the country overnight on Wednesday as the temperature dropped to -12C.

Story from :
BBC NEWS
Published: 2005/12/29 13:36:11 GMT