Russia’s Urals region has been hit with freak winter weather, with severe snowstorms causing massive traffic jams, flight delays, power blackouts and school closures.
Just when everybody in the cities of Ekaterinburg and Chelyabinsk
thought they had waved winter good-bye and was anticipating
greener spring weather, blizzards dragging the region back to
winter.
Having heard the forecast for snow, internet users were taking
photos of the frail Urals spring that was proclaimed doomed by
meteorologists.
Those would later be used in “before and after” collages with “goodbye summer” hashtags.
“We have snow falling the whole day without stopping,”
an Instagram user wrote. “It’s sweeping severely, everything’s
white. My daughter even wanted to go for a snow-tubing ride.”
Winter struck the region hard, with precipitation twice the
monthly average coming as a shock to already burgeoning grass and
trees.
Chelyabinsk made headlines across the world last year when a huge
meteorite rocked the region.
These late April blizzards have led to numerous online jokes over
the region’s “misfortune.”
“Chelyabinsk’s somewhat harsh,” one Twitter user wrote.
“They either have meteorite or snow at the end of
spring.”
The sudden return of winter has led to chaos on the region’s
highways.
“My parents have been stuck in a traffic jam for 17 hours
already… Severe Chelyabinsk spring…” a Vkontakte (Russian
social network) user, Maria, wrote.
Many of the drivers have already changed their winter tires for
summer ones, making vehicles clumsy on icy roads.
Local police have recorded 700 road accidents in the Central
Urals region.
Twenty-three children who were returning to Tyumen from
Ekaterinburg, where they had participated in competitions, had to
be evacuated by rescuers from a 40 kilometer-long traffic jam.
Tens of thousands of people in towns across the snowstorm-struck
region were left without electricity, following snow-induced
power line disruptions.
Chelyabinsk authorities had to shutter schools on Saturday.
Rough weather has led to numerous flight delays at airports in
Chelyabinsk and Ekaterinburg. Some of the passengers had to spend
up to 16 hours waiting for their flights which only resumed
Saturday morning.
Urals meteorologists have said the last time the region was
struck by a snowfall of such severity in springtime was 123 years
ago. They’ve found an April 26, 1891 issue of “Ekaterinburg
Week” magazine that reported how the region witnessed
“even more snow fallen than throughout the whole
winter”.