MOSCOW (Reuters) – Heavy snowfall has buried Moscow in massive snowdrifts. This disrupted transport, delayed flights and made it difficult to accommodate pedestrians facing strong winds and temperatures of minus 15 Celsius (5 Fahrenheit).
The snowfall started late on Thursday and is expected to end on Sunday. The Russian emergency services advised people to stay away from trees, warning of gusts of 18 meters per second (40 mph). “This is a real snowstorm, a snow Armageddon, a snow apocalypse. This is not a practice warning, but a warning to fight,” Evgeny Tishkovets of the weather service Phobos was quoted as saying by the RIA news agency before the snowfall has begun.
Early Saturday, the snow depth in the city reached 56 centimeters (22 inches), Fobos said. It was almost a record high of 60 cm for accumulated snow on 13 February.
On Friday, Moscow had a record snowfall on February 12, breaking the previous record for the 1973 date. Russian news agencies have called the national meteorological service.
There were several flight delays at the airports in Moscow, a city with more than 12 million people. Unusually for a weekend there was traffic in many places.
About 60,000 people were cleaning the streets, the mayor’s office in Moscow said.
(Reporting by Lev Sergeev and Alexander Reshetnikov; Writing by Andrey Ostroukh; Edited by Frances Kerry)