BRITAIN UNDER SNOW

Greymouth Evening Star, 8 February 1947, Page 6

BRITAIN UNDER SNOW

UNPRECEDENTED FALL IN LONDON COAL SITUATION CRITICAL LONDON, February 6. Snow blotted out almost the whole of Britain overnight. Only Wales and parts of south-western England escaped. Latest reports show that blizzards are still raging in many parts of northern England and snow is falling over a wide area of southern England. Buckinghamshire has had snow continuously for 16 hours. London had an almost unprecedented fall and certainly the present winter’s heaviest, with six to eight mches in central London and greater depths in the suburbs. Early workers tramped along pavements on which they sank over their shoetops in soft snow. The roads which were like skating rinks, caused buses and cars to travel with extreme caution. Grit and sand had to be thrown on hilly roads to enable the tyres to grip the surfaces. Snow again began to fall heavily in London at 1 a.iri., arid continued for three hours.

The police called in all the parties searching the snow-covered moorland near Whitby for a couple missing since they left a hotel at Goathland on February 3. The police at Whitby received a telegram stating, “Quite safe in London.” They are investigating the authenticity of the telegram. • “The bodies of two children dead from cold and hunger were discovered outside the remote village of Stiring Wendel, in the Moseland department, near the French-Saar frontier,” says the ,Nancy correspondent of. the Associated Press. “The bodies were identified as those of two of hundreds of Saar children who had been secretly crossing the Saar frontier to beg food in France.”

DEATHS FROM COLD IN UNITED STATES NEW YORK, Feb. 7. The cold weather which has swept the country in the last two. days has reached as far south as Florida where frost caused winter crop losses, in the Miami area amounting to millions of dollars. An official said that 42,000 acres of tomatoes, beans and squash had been destroyed. Fourteen persons died from cold throughout the country, including six in New York. Temperatures in some areas were more than 20 degrees below zero. The lowest in New York was five degrees above zero. Further intense cold is forecast for the weekend. At Dawson in the Yukon householders burned pickets fences, discarded furniture and even woodsheds when the cold snap entered its fifteenth day of temperatures averaging 60 degrees below, zero.