Jacques Frost

Milan was colder than Moscow, and Madrid turned into a skating rink, with first-aid stations set up to treat all the broken bones. A village in France's Lozère region shivered in the coldest temperatures ever recorded in the country —29.2° below zero Fahrenheit. Holiday skiers in the Swiss Alps found little joy in temperatures that reached —13° F. In Venice's Piazza San Marco, where makeshift bridges were set up two weeks ago so that pedestrians could negotiate the tide-flooded square, children skied and tossed snowballs. While Scandinavia was unseasonably warm, a deep Arctic freeze brought thick fogs, heavy snowstorms, knife-sharp winds and freezing rain to France, Britain, Spain, Italy, the two Germanys and most of Eastern Europe. It was Europe's most freakish winter weather in memory.

White Catastrophe. Arriving at the height of Europe's holiday travel period, the cold and storms were caused by a vast high-pressure area with temperature-inversion layers that stretched from Spain to the Ukraine. On much of the Continent, mountainous regions basked in relatively warm air and sunshine while the lowlands were shrouded in a chilly gray stratus cover. The Eurofreeze created wartime-like refugee conditions for those caught on impassable highways, in crowded train stations and in befogged airports. Travel was sometimes impossible by any means.

London's Heathrow Airport was jammed for three days with 10,000 shivering passengers grounded by an icy fog. Stretches of the Danube froze over, trapping countless vessels. Drifts blocked approaches to the world's longest underpass, the Simplon twin railway tunnels between Switzerland and Italy. In France's Rhone Valley, some 15,000 vehicles on auto routes to the Riviera were snowbound in drifts as high as 10 ft. Some motorists were trapped for 72 hours in their cars, and two babies were born in the autos before their mothers could be rescued. Normally punctual French trains were canceled or delayed for up to six hours by frozen switches, and by the efforts of engineers who stopped to pick up stranded motorists in the open countryside. The sub-zero cold caused power shortages in Czechoslovakia and East Germany, and East Berlin streets were blacked out to conserve electricity. In Yugoslavia, where drifts reached 16 ft. on major highways and to the second floor of buildings in the city of Sarajevo, local papers spoke of "the white catastrophe."