A BUNCH OF SNOWFLAKES!
Birmingham shuts all its schools – a day AFTER first serious snowfall hits roads and rail
IT was the first serious snowfall of the winter, and predictably much of the country was paralysed yesterday.
But, even though gritters will have tackled what is left of the snow overnight, England’s second city will still grind to a halt – much to the chagrin of parents and workers.
Although little snow is expected today, all schools in Birmingham will be shut, bus services scrapped and bin collections abandoned.
Critics branded the closures ‘ridiculous’ and said headteachers were ‘too quick’ to shut in bad weather.
Some 200,000 children will have an extra day off after Birmingham City Council – Britain’s largest local authority – decided to shut all its schools. Bin collections were cancelled because it was ‘not safe for people to take their rubbish out’.
Other schools across the country are also shut today as yesterday saw the effect of a so-called ‘snowbomb’, in which moist air from the Atlantic comes up against a rapidly increasing whirlpool of violently strong winds and storms from the Arctic.
The West Midlands was one of the worst affected areas, with around eight inches of snow – although much of it in the city centre had turned to slush last night.
The weather also exposed the fragility of Britain’s transport network. Roads were closed, bus and train services cancelled and airports temporarily shut down.
Thousands of homes were left without power, and events across the country were cancelled – including, ironically, the ice rink installed at the Quays in Gloucester.
Shopping outlet Bicester Village, Oxfordshire, was left without electricity, and was forced to close early at midday, while a Christmas market in Lincolnshire was also shut, to the frustration of shoppers.
The travel chaos is expected to continue today, with forecasters warning of treacherous conditions on the roads as freezing
‘It’s the easy option to close’
overnight temperatures turn the snow into deadly black ice.
The RAC said so-called ‘Black Monday’ is set to be one of its busiest days for ten years, with an estimated 11,000 call-outs.
Temperatures were expected to plunge as low as - 12C (10F) overnight, as the Met Office issued a yellow weather warning for ice covering central and southern England and northern Scotland.
Birmingham City Council said its schools were closed due to ‘recent adverse weather and forecast for freezing conditions’.
Colin Diamond, Birmingham’s children’s director, said even if pupils could walk to school, the council could not guarantee there would be enough staff there to look after them.
Schools are also shut in Gloucestershire, Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire and Worcestershire, even though little snow is expected to fall today.
In Gloucestershire, more than 60 schools will be shut, as well as more than 50 in Worcestershire, and 75 in Powys.
Other closures were announced in Shropshire, Essex, Staffordshire, Derbyshire, Leicestershire and Buckinghamshire.
Even schools in London were planning to shut their doors today. Drapers Academy, which runs a number of schools in Romford, East London, said it was closing because staff did not think they would be able to get in.
But while some parents welcomed a ‘snow day’, others were incredulous.
Michelle Skeels wrote on Facebook: ‘How ridiculous... it will be melted by tomorrow.’ Margaret Morrissey, of campaign group Parents Outloud, said: ‘I think the schools are too quick to close, it is the easy option.
‘I think the decision to close all of the schools in a city as big as Birmingham is quite frankly ridiculous.’
The heaviest snowfall yesterday was in Sennybridge, in the Brecon Beacons, where over a foot of snow (32cm) was recorded, making roads impassable.
In England nearly seven inches (17cm) was recorded in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire.
Motorists endured gridlock as they battled the treacherous conditions. Many motorways were closed temporarily, and there were severe delays on the M25, with ‘multiple incidents’ of vehicles crashing into others.
Furious drivers took to social media, accusing local councils and Highways England of failing to grit many roads.
Rail passengers also endured major disruption, with most operators announcing delays and cancellations, while travellers in areas with the heaviest snowfall were advised not to travel at all.
Yesterday evening, Network Rail announced no CrossCountry trains would run between Birmingham and Bristol in both directions because of a landslide caused by the extreme weather.
Buses were also affected, as National Express West Midlands announced yesterday evening that all its bus and coach serv-
ices across Birmingham and the West Midlands have been ‘suspended until further notice’.
Meanwhile, flights were temporarily suspended at Luton and Birmingham airports and delays at Heathrow and Stansted.
Passengers complained of being trapped on a British Airways plane at Heathrow for more than four hours while receiving little information from the airline.
Another four BA flights bound for the airport were diverted 300 miles away to Newcastle. People also suffered at home, as up to 24,000 homes in Oxfordshire, Berkshire and Wiltshire were cut off after snow and wind blew branches into the overhead network.
Thousands more homes across the South West of England, West Midlands and Wales were affected by power cuts.
In the West Midlands, the Heart of England Trust said it was inundated with offers of help after it put out an appeal on Twitter for drivers of 4x4 vehicles to ferry nurses to hospitals.
Forecasters said high pressure will move across the UK tomorrow, bringing widespread fine and dry but still cold conditions.
However, the Met Office said it was also keeping an eye on ‘Storm Ana’, which could bring wet and windy weather to parts of southern England – not to mention the potential for more snow.
A Dover-bound ferry with more than 300 people aboard ran aground at Calais yesterday afternoon as high winds battered the port. Passengers were stranded for two hours before the vessel was refloated. None was injured.
STORM Caroline made her presence felt late last week with winds of up to 90mph. But it’s the sting in her tail, Snowbomb Sunday, that much of Britain woke up to yesterday, causing blizzard conditions, road chaos and up to 12 inches of snow in some places.
A snowbomb sounds suitably dramatic, and you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s just another trendy new phrase, like photobomb (popping up uninvited in someone else’s photograph). But it does, in fact, have a proper scientific meaning.
Meteorologists use the term ‘weatherbomb’ to denote a dramatic plunge in atmospheric pressure, when the pressure at the centre of a weather system drops by at least 24 millibars within 24 hours.
So what triggers it? This sudden fall in pressure is caused by the ‘jet stream’ — fast-flowing cool winds high up in the atmosphere — sucking up air, rather like a vacuum cleaner, from an area of the North Atlantic below. This reduces the weight of the air, which in turn causes atmospheric pressure to fall at sea level.
The developing low pressure system in turn sucks in air from surrounding regions — in this case, Arctic air from Scandinavia and the East — to create a rapidly increasing whirlpool of violently strong winds and stormy weather (known as an explosive cyclogenesis or bombogenesis).
When combined with moist air from the North Atlantic, the end result is freezing wet snow and ice — as we have seen this weekend. It is, in effect, a massively powerful, more intense and much colder version of the type of Atlantic low-pressure system that normally dictates our weather at this time of year.
Global weather experts have been warning of such an abnormally harsh event for the UK since spring, when they reported that the waters of the Eastern Pacific had become abnormally cold. This cold water produces a weather phenomenon known as La Nina (‘the little girl’).
The effect of La Nina has been to push the jet stream northwards to a place where it can cause dramatic pressure drops in the Atlantic, propelling bitterly chilled air and high winds eastwards into Britain. Last night, temperatures as low as minus 15c were forecast, so the joys — if you’re a child with a sledge — of Snowbomb Sunday will give way to the misery of Black Ice Monday.