EUROPE Rush to assist refugees amid extreme cold
BELGRADE, Serbia — Blizzards and dangerously low temperatures persisted in parts of Europe on Sunday, prompting Pope Francis to draw attention to the homeless suffering in freezing weather. In Serbia, aid workers scrambled to help hundreds of migrants sleeping rough in parks and makeshift shelters.
The extreme winter weather that has gripped Europe in the past days has caused more than a dozen deaths, left villages cut off, caused power and water outages, frozen rivers and lakes, grounded flights and led to road accidents. Serbia’s authorities on Sunday banned river traffic on its stretch of the Danube — one of Europe’s main rivers — because of ice and strong wind.
Two men died of cold in Poland on Saturday, bringing the nation’s death toll from winter weather to 55 since Nov. 1, authorities said Sunday. Temperatures dropped to minus 22 degrees in the mountains of southern Poland.
In Italy, eight deaths were blamed on the cold, including a man who died in the basement of an unused building in Milan, and another on a street flanking Florence’s Arno River. Francis asked God to “warm our hearts so we’ll help” the homeless.
In Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, several hundred men, mostly from Afghanistan and Pakistan, remained in an abandoned customs warehouse by the city’s bus station, where aid organizations distributed heaters, blankets, clothes and food in an attempt to keep them warm.
“We are all working together to help these people,” Mirjana Milenkovski, a spokeswoman for the U.N. refugee agency, said.
While most of the several thousand migrants in Serbia have stayed in the Balkan country’s asylum centers, hundreds have refused to do so, looking for ways to move on toward western Europe.
In neighboring Bulgaria, police said two men from Iraq and a Somali woman died from cold in the mountains near Turkey as they tried to make their way toward Europe.
German federal police said Sunday they picked up 19 migrants — including five children — at a highway stop in Bavaria who were suffering from hypothermia after their driver disappeared and left them on the back of an unheated a truck for hours in the freezing cold.
Black ice across northern and western Germany has caused countless accidents and injuries — firefighters in the city of Hamburg said Sunday they were called to weather-related accidents 415 times during the weekend.