Three Dead, Roads and Towns Blocked off as Snowstorms Hit Turkey
2004 11 26
Pedestrians make their way through a snowstorm in Istanbul. Three people were killed, roads were blocked and hundreds of villages were isolated as heavy snowstorms hit Turkey for the second time this week.(AFP/File/Mustafa Ozer) |
ANKARA - Three people were killed, roads were blocked and hundreds of villages were isolated as heavy snowstorms hit Turkey for the second time this week.
A 60-year-old man in the central province of Konya and another person in Palu, eastern Turkey, froze to death, the Anatolia news agency reported Thursday.
A six-year-old boy in central Aksaray province was crushed to death when the roof of his home collapsed under the weight of the snow. The NTV news channel added that a shepherd was reported missing in a mountain pasture in the northern province of Rize.
More than 900 villages in central and eastern Anatolia were suffering power cuts and telephone lines were also down in many areas because of heavy snowfall.
More than 1,500 villages are isolated because of snowstorms in the hardest hit central and eastern regions of the country, they said.
Schools were closed down for two days in Yozgat, just 150 kilometers (95 miles) east of the capital, Ankara, where the snowfall that began Wednesday evening continued Thursday, although with no major effects on traffic.
Motorists suffered long snarls on snow- and fog-bound Mount Bolu, the halfway point on the busy Trans-European Motorway between Ankara and Istanbul, Anatolia reported.
Air traffic seemed to be spared for the moment, but the authorities in the country's biggest city, Istanbul, where the sun was shining Thursday morning, warned the population and said they were on alert for a sudden drop in temperatures, accompanied by heavy snowfall, expected later in the day.
Winter came late but with a vengeance, descending suddenly on the country last weekend, just days after people were dining al fresco in Istanbul and Ankara and swimming and sunbathing on the western and southern coasts.
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