- On Saturday, only 16 of 650 planes departed Heathrow, stranding 400,000 passengers. On Sunday, most flights were cancelled, and the airport says it will take 5 days to get back to normal. However, the next four days are calling for snow, fog, sleet, and rain, all with freezing temperatures. (Jessica is stranded in Chicago, and I wish her godspeed coming home.)
- 20% of trains were delayed or cancelled due to snow. When I went into central London on Saturday, every tube line had partial closures and/or severe delays. (Most of the problems were where these trains ran overground.)
- The AA (equivalent of the AAA) reported up to 1,500 hours calls per hour, with 28,000 callouts on Monday, nearly 3 times normal. Tailbacks (traffic jams) of 6-8 hours on the major highways are not uncommon.
- As England doesn't celebrate Thanksgiving, we also don't have "Black Friday." The Saturday before Christmas is generally the busiest shopping day of the year, but this year footfall was down 24% over last year, despite the economy improving.
Meanwhile, the UK Transport Secretary said he was "seeking scientific advice to decide whether heavy snowfall was likely to be a regular occurrence in Britain," in order to justify investing in more infrastructure. Genius.
P.S. Sunday night dropped to 16F (-9C) in London. That would normally just be an academic fact, as I wouldn't be stupid enough to venture out into that kind of cold. However, for a long and complicated set of reasons, I had to go out to do some gardening and get a pizza. Not quite sure what I was thinking.
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