Paris' 'Monster' Blizzard

Night of Total Chaos Followed By Normality

Paris:- Sunday, 17. January 1999:- Last Tuesday about 17:00 I looked out of the window and saw that it was snowing. Wind was blowing the tiny flakes in waves as if it were washing powder. In a half-hour, the ground was white. From inside, it looked harmless.

At the same time, Paris and the Ile-de-France were just getting into the usual evening stride of rush-hour. Some of the commuters looked out their windows too, did a calculation and decided to dine in town; until the traffic mess that would surely develop, resolved itself.

But most commuters and other travellers blithely jumped in their cars, vans, trucks and motorcycles, and set off for home or their usual destinations.

By the time it quit snowing, there was a measly five centimetres of it lying on the ground, and around Paris there were 300 kilometres of solid traffic jams.

There wasn't much snow but what there was, was very slippery. Paris has its own heat, melthing it, but 40 or 50 traffic lights that failed in a crucial moment, did not make forward movement any easier.

Every major route out of the city was jammed tight, and the crush rolled backwards into the city. Highway trucks lost all traction and slid into the emergency lanes. It was chaos total.

Some drivers managed to reach home after taking nine hours on the road. Others abandoned the effort and slept in their cars. Emergency services were stuck in the jams too and got nowhere. There were hundreds of thousands of people stuck inside their little tin wagons, running low on fuel, without anything to eat or drink, and in many cases, with absolutely no way to escape.

The portable phones did not help much, other than to phone home. Radio broadcasts did not help much, because they only told drivers that they were in a horrible jam.

Where drivers could, they assaulted hotels for rooms and restaurants for food. Strangers shared rooms and the restaurants ran out of food. Commutes normally lasting 45 minutes, turned into four-hour marathons.

On Wednesday, Le Parisien ran photos of the chaos. TV-news showed kids having harmless snowball fights under the Tour Eiffel and on the Champs-Elysées.

There were no TV shots of the A-13, the west autoroute that runs across the ridge of the Marly forest - with only a couple of exits. This wasn't on the TV-news unless a news crew happened to be trapped in it.

On Thursday, Le Parisien was looking for someone to blame. TV-news reports about the recent terrible storms in the United States' midwest were fresh in the editor's minds when they went looking for culprits.

They learned that the weather forecasters had issued a bulletin Tuesday morning, predicting snowfall. Their timing was off by an hour or two, but it was a good prediction.

Somehow this prediction - and only five centimetres of snow fell - didn't reach or didn't impress the traffic control centre. The other concerned emergency centres did not inform local authorities of the coming snow. Public and private radio stations were not informed particulrly.