Flood chaos in Balkans as Europe begins to thaw

An early cold snap slowly released Europe from its icy grip Sunday after days of mayhem and dozens of deaths, but floods displaced thousands in the Balkans and chaos still hit Spanish airports.

In northern Albania, more than 11,000 people were evacuated after a week of torrential rains in the region turned roads into raging torrents of water and left some 14,000 hectares (35,000 acres) of farmland under water.

The only way in and out of the town of Shkodra was by boat or helicopter, with streets under two metres (6.5 feet) of water and Albania calling for outside help for the 1,500 police and army working around the clock.

Turkey sent three helicopters and Greece two.

“The situation is very difficult,” Albanian President Bamir Topi said.

Authorities fear that more heavy rain could raise water levels further and overwhelm water-gates at hydro-electric power plants.

In neighbouring Montenegro, the situation was still serious on Sunday in the region of Lake Skadar, on the border with Albania and around the capital Podgorica. More than 1,000 soldiers were called to help the population.

In Bosnia meanwhile, three people were killed in northern Bosnia when their home collapsed due to a landslide triggered by heavy rains, national radio reported.

Elsewhere temperatures inched higher after a week of bitterly cold weather killed more than 60 people, most of them in Central Europe.

But temperatures remained below freezing point in many areas, and the deaths overnight of a man and a woman in Prague brought the number killed in the cold snap to six in the Czech capital.

In Poland, five more people died, bringing the death toll there to 36 since the beginning of the month and to 51 since the start of November.

Temperatures early Sunday fell to minus 24 Celsius (minus 11 Fahrenheit) in the south of the country.

Britain, shivering in the earliest widespread snowfalls of winter since 1993, was one of the countries worst affected with two of its major transport hubs scrapping all flights last week.

By Sunday milder weather had caused the snow to disappear completely in some areas, and the situation on the roads, railways and at airports was much improved. But forecasters warned that temperatures would fall again this week.

In one pub in Blakey Ridge, northern England, five employees snowed in for the past eight days were hoping to be liberated later on Sunday, with the novelty of the situation having long worn off.

“We have had people phoning up asking to get trapped in, but it’s kind of boring now and I would like to go home,” said Daniel Butterworth, one of those in the enforced lock-in.

There have also been several days of chaos at Spanish airports, although this time the weather was not to blame but a wildcat strike by air traffic controllers that closed national airspace for a time.

On Sunday hundreds of thousands of passengers still packed the airports as flights resumed after the first national state of alert since 1975 saw the army put the controllers back to work.

The strike hit an estimated 300,000 passengers on a long holiday weekend, whipping up the most chaotic scenes since an Icelandic volcano erupted in April and halted 100,000 flights worldwide.

In Germany, temperatures rose to just above freezing in many areas, particularly in low-lying areas in the north, but authorities warned motorists of black ice as temperatures plummet again overnight.

A recently introduced law obliges motorists to drive using winter, or all-weather tyres.

In Austria, temperatures of minus 10 Celsius (14 degrees Fahrenheit) were recorded in the east of the country, but milder weather and rain were forecast. Authorities in the state of Tyrol issued avalanche warnings.

In Belgium, the transport was slowy returning to normal, but fresh snowfall contributed to the death of a motorist whose car slid off the road and into the side of a house in the eastern Liege region.

In the Netherlands up to 1,000 transit passengers spent the night at Amsterdam-Schiphol airport.

In Portugal, around 20 secondary roads remained unpassable in the northern mountainous regions.