Another Storm Brings Travel Delays in Europe
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PARIS -- Even as troubles at London's delay-plagued Heathrow Airport began to clear up, a fresh storm and shortages of de-icing fluid brought new transport chaos to Europe on Friday, snarling traffic, slowing trains and delaying flights for thousands of Christmas Eve travelers.
The accumulation of stranded passengers grew on Friday at Roissy-Charles de Gaulle Airport, the major hub for Paris, where a lack of de-icing fluid compounded the delays as planes sat on the tarmac. About 2,000 people remained camped inside the airport from delays built up over the week.
"We're expecting shortly to receive 12 tons of de-icing fluid from the United States, delivered by plane, and there are truckloads arriving from Germany, as well," said a spokeswoman for Aéroports de Paris, which operates the Paris airports. While deliveries began arriving in the morning, the airport operator said, delays persisted.
Airports in Ireland and Belgium also faced de-icing shortages, leading to cascading delays.
An onslaught of snow and ice across northern Europe early Friday morning turned a white Christmas Eve into a travel nightmare.
"On a day like today, we would normally have had around 25,000 flights across Europe by now," Rena Fakhouri, a spokeswoman for the air safety organization Eurocontrol, said Friday morning. "By contrast, we've had about 15,500 so far today."
Not only was that number insufficient to move all the frantic holiday travelers with tickets for Friday, it also meant airports added to the number of frustrated passengers.
The snow this week has been unusually sticky, the Paris airports spokeswoman said, requiring twice as much de-icing as is normally the case and leading to the shortage in France. There was enough fluid for about 200 flights to take off on Friday, the transport minister, Thierry Mariani, told the French daily Le Figaro. But, he told the local news media, many of those stranded at Charles de Gaulle would spend Christmas morning in an airport terminal.
A spokeswoman for the Paris airports said that situation had improved since Friday morning, when 50 percent of flights were canceled, but a massive passenger backlog still meant dashed hopes for thousands of people who had intended to reach their families or vacation destinations for the holiday.
Officials at Charles de Gaulle airport briefly evacuated part of a large international terminal, 2E, where about two feet snow had accumulated on the roof. In 2004, part of the same terminal's roof collapsed, killing four people and leading to structural changes.
First Published December 24, 2010 11:50 pm
