Muscovites Advised to Stay Home Due to Cold

[Mark]

Calling on Moscow residents to stay indoors, the Emergency Situations Ministry said temperatures would drop to between minus 16 C and minus 21 C in the early hours of Wednesday, while temperatures in the eastern part of the Moscow region would plunge to minus 26 C.
 
In the Sakha republic village of Oymayakon, considered the coldest permanently inhabited place on earth, temperatures dropped to minus 54.7 C overnight.
 
http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/muscovites-advised-to-stay-home-due-to-cold/473247.html
 
Thanks to Argiris Diamantis for this link
 

“Ojmjakon and Verkhoyansk are the coldest Siberian settlements,” says Argiris. “Ojmjakon measured already a night temperature of minus 54,7 degrees Celsius. Now winter begins like this, the chance is great that record lows will be broken in January-February.”

• Tweet

[Mark]

“Russia is enduring its harshest winter in over 70 years, with temperatures plunging as low as -50 degrees Celsius,” reports Russia Today. Dozens of people have already died, and almost 150  hospitalized.
 
­The country has not witnessed such a long cold spell since 1938, meteorologists said, with temperatures 10 to 15 degrees lower than the seasonal norm all over Russia.
 
The Moscow region saw temperatures of -17 to -18 degrees Celsius on Wednesday, and the record cold temperatures are expected to linger for at least three more days. Thermometers in Siberia touched -50 degrees Celsius, which is also abnormal for December.
 
Over the weekend, meteorologists predict temperatures will plunge even lower in the Moscow region, hitting -25. The Russian capital is also expected to be swept with snow, RIA Novosti reported.
 
http://rt.com/news/russia-freeze-cold-temperature-379/

[Mark]

Russia hit with harshest winter in 70 years: Americans feeling their first wintry blast of the season on Wednesday could take some comfort from this: In Moscow it felt like 10 below – part of a week-long cold spell across Russia that has parts of Siberia feeling like 50 below. Across Russia, the deep freeze killed at least 45 people over the last week, 21 on Tuesday alone, the English-language Moscow Times reported Wednesday. Nearly 270 people were hospitalized, more than half with frostbite. Russia’s emergency ministry urged everyone in Moscow to stay indoors on Wednesday, while forecasters said the cold could get worse over the weekend. Siberia has been hardest hit, with cities like Novosibirsk dipping to minus 20 degrees Fahrenheit on Wednesday. With the wind chill, it felt like minus 47. The temperatures have been abnormally low for Russia at this time of year. Last week, the cold in Siberia nearly killed two circus elephants after their trailer caught fire, the RIA news agency reported. -MSNBC

http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/12/19/16022433-deep-freeze-across-russia-dips-to-50-below-at-least-45-die?lite

[Mark]

Freezing temperatures have even affected typically warm regions.
 
Since temperatures plunged below minus 18 degrees Celsius in Moscow and minus 50 degrees in Siberia, more than 50 people have died from weather-related illnesses, says this article in The Moscow Times.
 
During the cold snap that started over a week ago, 722 people have been injured, 371 have been hospitalized and 56 have died, RIA-Novosti reported, citing hypothermia and frostbite as among the most common weather-related illnesses.
 
The Emergency Situations Ministry has issued warnings to residents of 15 Russian regions, including Kamchatka, Novosibirsk, Omsk, Irkutsk and the Khanty-Mansiisk autonomous district, where the cold has also disrupted energy supplies.
 
Freezing temperatures have even affected typically warm regions, the report said. In Makhachkala, the capital of the Dagestan republic in the North Caucasus, the airport was closed due to heavy snowfalls, which delayed 3,000 travelers.
 
Elsewhere in southern Russia, authorities declared a state of emergency in the Karachayevo-Cherkessia republic and the Stavropol region due to thick snowdrifts, while in the Krasnodar region wind speeds reached 25 meters per second.
 
http://www.themoscowtimes.com/mobile/article/death-toll-from-cold-keeps-rising/473429.html

[Rwood]

It may be a "harshest spell" for 70 years - but it's a nonsense to call it a
"harshest winter" as the season is only 3 weeks old and the final average could be completely different. Typical journalism!

A year or so ago English tabloid rags were using similar terms, only for the latter part of the season to be abnormally mild.

[Mark]

Bitter cold spell Russia has claimed 123 lives in the past 10 days, an official says.
 
Temperatures have plunged to around minus 30 degrees Celsius (minus 22 F) in the Moscow region and minus 60 Celsius (minus 76 F) in Eastern Siberia, an unseasonably early freeze in a country used to notoriously tough winters.
 
Temperatures have been about 12 degrees Celsius lower than seasonal norms in Russia, where the coldest weather usually does not arrive until January or February.
 
In the Moscow region, Monday became an all-time record for the amount of electricity consumed by residents, Russia’s power operator said on Tuesday, blaming unusually cold temperatures.
 
In neighboring Ukraine last week, the cold claimed 83 lives, new data showed.
 
On Tuesday, the health ministry declared that the numbers of victims would now be made available only once a week.
 
http://www.news.com.au/breaking-news/world/russias-brutal-winter-claims-123-lives/story-e6frfkui-1226543460539

[Suezy]

Ouch Mark that is really cold - pleased I live where we do.

[Mark]

More than 120 people have died from the severe cold — at least seven in the last 24 hours.
 
As temperatures plummet to -50 Celsius in some parts of Russia, thousands have been evacuated from their homes in the country’s Far East and Siberia.
 
Meteorologists say the country is experiencing one of its coldest winters in decades.
 
In the Far East region of Magadan, 180 miles (300 km) of roads remain blocked by heavy snow. Plows and machines can not reach those roads to clear them. In some places, snow is as much as five meters (16½ ft) deep.
 
In the Tyva region of Siberia where temperatures have been -40 C for several days, it is so cold that many heating pipes have frozen and thousands of people have been evacuated from their homes.
 
http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2012/12/28/2012122800375.html

[Mark]

Record snowfalls and extreme sub-zero temperatures during Russia’s freezing winter have driven the number of deaths to more than 200, with 18 deaths reported on Tuesday alone.
 
This winter some 207 people have frozen to death, reports the Interfax news agency. Particularly affected is the Tyumen region in Western Siberia.
 
More than 4500 people have been treated since the onset of winter due to frostbite or hypothermia.
 
The Russian weather service forecast that temperatures will fall even farther in the days to come. In Moscow, it should cool during the day to minus 18 degrees Celsius, and at night, especially north of the capital, to as low as minus 27. degrees.
 
http://newsticker.sueddeutsche.de/list/id/1409339

[Mark]

05 February 2013 | Issue 5062
 
By Roland Oliphant
 


The heaviest snowfall in a century brought Moscow and the surrounding region to a near standstill and left hundreds of people without power, officials said Tuesday.

And with snowfall set to continue at least until the end of the week, the authorities are bracing for more chaos on the roads.

"There hasn't been such a winter in 100 years," Pyotr Biryukov, deputy mayor for residential issues, said Tuesday in comments carried by Interfax. "The snow this year has already reached one and a half times the climatic norm," he said.

The capital has seen 216 centimeters of snow fall since the beginning of winter, Biryukov said.

Average snowfall in Moscow is 152 centimeters a year. Biryukov said the city saw 26 centimeters in the 24 hours preceding his Tuesday afternoon news conference and has seen 36 centimeters since the beginning of February. 


The heavy snowfall that struck the city Monday quickly led to chaos on the roads. The Yandex Probki traffic monitoring service reached a full 10 points, and on Monday evening it issued the seldom-seen warning that "it's quicker to walk."

Moscow traffic police said Tuesday that they had counted more than 3,000 minor traffic accidents in the previous 24 hours, far exceeding the daily average for the city.

"There were 3,160 small traffic accidents in Moscow over the past day," a police spokesman said.
 
The average number of traffic accidents in the city is between 1,500 and 2,500 per day, he said.

Monday's unprecedented number of fender benders stems from traffic violations by drivers due to difficult conditions.
 
Snowfall is set to continue for the rest of the week but should slowly ease off, with forecasters predicting just 2 centimeters a day until Friday.


Read more: http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/heaviest-snowfall-in-a-century-hits-moscow/475102.html#ixzz2K598NbsJ
 The Moscow Times