People sledge in the snow in Valley Gardens in Harrogate. Further light snowfalls are forecast today, the Met Office said.
London Evening Standard/London
Hundreds of air passengers forced to camp out overnight at Heathrow vented their anger yesterday as snow and freezing conditions caused major disruption for a third day running.
As at least 160 flights were grounded yesterday at Britain’s busiest airport, British Airways booked an extra 2,500 hotel rooms for stranded passengers.
The airline also apologised to a group of 20 BA customers sent to the wrong hotel who ended up sleeping on the conference room floor at another.
On the first working day since heavy snowfall hit the region, experts said disruption to Tube, rail and air travel will cost the London economy hundreds of millions of pounds. However, they forecast that the financial impact will be less than the £1.5bn blow dealt to business by the 2010 snowstorm which closed Heathrow.
Hundreds of thousands of rail passengers suffered delays of at least an hour as trains into London Bridge, Victoria and Waterloo operated on reduced winter services and a broken-down train closed Cannon Street during the morning peak. Seven out of 11 Tube lines were disrupted due mainly to overrunning engineering work.
But much of the frustration was focused on Heathrow’s inability to make it business as usual despite spending £36mn on new snowploughs since the 2010 fiasco.
Yesterday’s cancelled flights, due to very low visibility, came on top of the 260 grounded on Sunday.
Heathrow warned the figure could rise as other European airports cancelled flights because of the weather. Paris, Madrid, Milan, Frankfurt, Manchester and Glasgow were among destinations affected.
London City Airport reopened its runway at about 7am after clearing ice, but there were numerous cancellations and delays.
Mayor Boris Johnson said: “An airport running at over 98% capacity has nowhere to go when problems hit. We need a new four-runway hub airport that gives the UK the flexibility it needs to operate unhindered.”
Window cleaner Howard Allenby, 36, from Leeds and his girlfriend Natasha were among 20 passengers who slept on the floor of the Aurora International hotel near Heathrow after their flight to Zambia was cancelled for a second day.
Allenby said: “The BA procedure is there’s no procedure. You get sent from pillar to post.”
The airline said: “We are extremely sorry our customers have been experiencing so much frustration and inconvenience,” and warned people only to come to the airport with a confirmed booking. If their flight has been cancelled they can re-book an alternative flight or claim a full refund, BA said.
Chris McKinnon, Jamie Shaw, Derek Hewitt, Cheryl McCue, Craig Cairney and Ashley Simpson, all friends from Glasgow, were stranded on their way home from a holiday in India.
Fishmonger Cairney, 30, said: “We got here at 11.30am Sunday and were due to fly at 8pm, then it was delayed until 9pm, 10pm and finally cancelled. The way we have been spoken to is a disgrace.”
Beauty therapist Ms Simpson, 27, added: “It was a brilliant trip, but this has turned it into a holiday from hell.”
Miami-based husband and wife Matthew and Lauren Rothstein, both 29, were set to abandon their seven-day holiday in Paris. Mrs Rothstein said: “I don’t get it. This is nothing, this is not real snow.”
Main line Cannon Street rail station was closed throughout the peak due to a broken-down train and Southeastern services were terminating and starting at London Bridge.
London Overground was suspended between Surrey Quays and Clapham Junction and Willesden Junction and Richmond. There were delays or reduced services on main line Chiltern Railways, East Coast, Eurostar, First Capital Connect, Gatwick Express, Greater Anglia, London Midland, South West Trains Southeastern and Southern services. Eurostar services were delayed by up to an hour.
Woman ‘freezes to death’ yards from home
A 25-year-old woman is believed to have frozen to death after collapsing as she walked home through deep snow. Bernadette Lee’s body was found in the street by a man walking his dog the next morning. She was yards from her sister’s house where she had been staying.
One possibility is that she fell and banged her head or that she fell asleep after being unable to get up and succumbed to the freezing temperatures.
Heavy snow continued to wreak havoc in London and the South-East yesterday with bitterly cold weather expected for the rest of the week. At least 160 flights were cancelled at Heathrow and there were delays on the trains and Tube.
Police investigating Lee’s death said she had been out with friends in Deal in Kent on Saturday night. A Kent police spokeswoman said: “We think it is probably a tragic accident where a young woman was on her way home from a night out and didn’t quite make it to the address she was staying at.”
Police say another theory is that she suffered a “medical episode” and collapsed.
Kenneth Mitchell, 69, who lives in Church Meadows where she was found, said: “It was absolutely freezing on Saturday night and you wouldn’t have lasted long out there if you’d fallen in the snow. There must have been about six inches of snow out there.”
Hundreds of tributes to Lee were left on a Facebook page set up in her memory yesterday.
Earlier a man was killed when his car careered off the road into a tree in the icy conditions in Essex. The accident happened on the northbound carriageway of the A12 between Kelvedon and MarksTey at about 7pm yesterday.
The driver, a 59-year-old man from the Colchester area, died at the scene. His passenger, a 57-year-old woman, was taken to hospital with serious injuries.
Meanwhile a woman who was seriously hurt in an avalanche in the Scottish Highlands which killed four of her friends was yesterday in a critical condition. The 24-year-old, from the Durham area, is being cared for at Glasgow’s Southern General Hospital, where she was flown after initially being treated at Belford hospital in Fort William.
She suffered severe head injuries in the avalanche, which struck at about 2pm on Saturday in Glencoe. Those killed were PhD students Christopher Bell, 24, and Tom Chesters, 28, and 25-year-old junior doctor Una Finnegan.