Europe Gets Deep Freeze at New Year

BERLIN — From Russia to Turkey to Wales, people are falling through thin ice, getting stranded, freezing to death and even being forced to give birth outdoors as a cold front moving west from Siberia has brought Europe days of record-breaking low temperatures and, in some places, paralyzing snow.

In such weather, even the reindeer have been dying. On Russia’s far-northern Chukotka Peninsula, about 10,000 of the hardy animals have perished after unseasonably warm, rainy weather suddenly gave way to hurricane-force winds and temperatures of minus 40. The reindeer’s pastures have disappeared under a thick layer of ice.

“All in all, it’s pretty grim,” said British meteorologist Philip Eden, predicting still-colder temperatures and heavier snow for the first days of 1997.

With temperatures dipping as low as minus 34 in Europe, 120 people are reported so far to have died in weather-related incidents. Most of the victims have been the homeless or elderly people living in ill-heated housing. But avalanches caused by heavy snow have also killed at least 10 people in Austria, Turkey and Georgia.

In Moscow, frigid weather has caused manhole covers to pop off and door-security code boxes to jam, locking inhabitants out of their apartments. Trams and trolley buses are stalling as icicles cut the power lines overhead. Buses in the Czech Republic are breaking down because their diesel fuel is frozen at 22 below zero.

In Bucharest, the Romanian capital, thousands of street children are reported to have taken shelter in the relative warmth of the city sewer system. In the Bulgarian city of Radnevo, four patients in a psychiatric hospital reportedly died after the coal ran out and the building went without heat for 10 days. One patient was reported to have jumped out the window, screaming, “I am dying of cold!”

In Vienna, the Fire Department has battled dozens of blazes set accidentally by residents trying to melt frozen water pipes by holding open flames underneath. In the northwest French city of Rouen, an emergency room has treated about 130 pedestrians who slipped on the city’s ice-slicked sidewalks, suffering broken bones or wrenched backs. In Warsaw, municipal workers are making the rounds of the city’s ponds and waterways, pulling out ducks and swans that have frozen into the water.

England has escaped the worst of the continental chills, but even there the British Broadcasting Corp. is airing repeated warnings not to walk on the new ice, after a suburban London couple drowned Sunday while trying to save their pet Labrador, who had fallen through inch-thick ice on a pond.

Even such sunny Mediterranean winter havens as Majorca and Corsica have come in for severe weather warps. Higher elevations on the palm-studded French island of Corsica received nearly 2 feet of snow Sunday, closing passes and cutting off small towns. The island’s Bastia-Poretta airport was snowed in for nine hours, and 10,000 Corsicans were in the dark after heavy snow collapsed power pylons and high-tension lines.

More predictable snowstorms clobbered Russia’s southern Caucasus Mountains, crushing the roofs of grain silos, snapping power lines, hampering food deliveries and closing two airports. Damage to the Stavropol region has been estimated at $50 million.

Defeated Russian troops, withdrawing to Stavropol from separatist Chechnya after two years of war, are now shivering in snow-whipped tents and flimsy barracks, living with the help of handouts of potatoes, warm socks, cigarettes and flu medicine from the local population.

Meanwhile, on a highway in the Caucasus region, an avalanche trapped about 300 people and 120 vehicles inside a 2 1/2-mile tunnel last week. Rescue workers, battling relentless snow and blinding fog, have managed this week to open a passage wide enough for people to escape on foot, but some truck drivers are insisting on staying in the tunnel with their rigs, for fear of looters.

Russia’s Itar-Tass news agency said two women gave birth while trapped in the tunnel, and that one of the babies had died of cold.

In Romania, where many small towns are cut off by drifted roads, a woman was reported to have given birth outdoors while seeking help. She and her baby were reportedly rescued after 15 shelterless hours and taken to a hospital in the town of Tutrakan, southeast of Bucharest.

In the German village of Wildau, near the Polish border, the arctic temperatures foiled an immigration attempt. Sixteen young men and boys from Bangladesh and Iraq surprised authorities when they turned themselves in: Their smugglers had instructed them to cross the ice-choked Oder River, which forms part of the German-Polish border, even though many of them had no winter clothes or even shoes.

The Iraqis and Bangladeshis were hospitalized in Germany with severe frostbite. Police are now searching for those who tried to smuggle them into Germany--a crime under the best of circumstances but lethal folly in record-breaking cold.

In western Germany, ship traffic on important inland waterways was halted by ice nearly 20 inches deep, and Axel Mauersberger, a spokesman for the Inland Shipping Assn., said he feared some transportation companies would face bankruptcy if their boats could not get underway soon.

But frozen canals brought smiles in the Netherlands, where hardy winter-sports enthusiasts laced on their skates and went gliding out over their country’s extensive waterway system.

Polish authorities also found something to smile about in the cold: Thieves are staying at home. Normally, Warsaw has about 50 car thefts a day, but on Thursday the police reported only 10 cases.

Across Europe, charitable missions and outreach services have been hard-pressed to meet the needs of the poor and the homeless.

In Milan, Italy, heated subway stations are being kept open all night for the homeless. France has set up a special toll-free telephone number for people who spot someone in danger of freezing to death. In London and other major British cities, temporary Christmas shelters have been ordered to stay open until the unusual cold passes.

Contributing to this report were staff writers Richard Boudreaux in Moscow, John-Thor Dahlburg in Paris and William D. Montalbano in London, and Ela Kasprzycka of The Times’ Warsaw Bureau.

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Europe’s Cold Snap

The pocket of very cold air sitting over central Europe is similar to the cold air that hangs over the Plains states in the United States at this time every year. Forecasters say the cold weather is expected to push into western France and northern Spain, and see little relief in the next 72 hours.

Jet Stream

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Tuesday low normal Belgrade 11 28 Berlin 7 28 Brussels 25 36 Kiev 3 19 Milan 27 34 Moscow 0 14 Paris 23 34 Prague -4 25 Rome 46 43 Vienna 10 30 Warsaw 5 25 Zurich 18 28

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Sources: Jon Erdman of WeatherData Inc.; Associated Press