A bus with tourists, stuck on the highway in the Chelyabinsk region, waited for help for 13 hours. It was minus 30 overboard. The blizzard lasted all night. And this is just one of the episodes.
On the road near Yuzhnouralsk, more than 60 vehicles were trapped in snow. Among them was a bus with a children's hockey team returning from training camps from near Tyumen.
Rescuers, traffic police officers and volunteers selflessly fought the elements and helped people get out of the snow drifts. It is noteworthy that one of the distinguished ones was inspector Ivan Novosyolov, who recently received an award from the governor of the Chelyabinsk region. On January 4, a policeman, accompanying a bus with children, exposed his official "UAZ" to the blow of a car that flew into the oncoming lane. And now - a new feat.
In the midst of the riot of the elements, a nightmare was happening on the roads. Cars drifted to the very roof. There were hundreds of cars stuck in the snow. In total, more than a thousand people were rescued from snow drifts in the Chelyabinsk region.
Two days after the blizzard, the region continued to clean the roads and pulled the cars abandoned on the highways out of the snowdrifts. In the cold, the equipment literally froze into the snow.
Where not long ago there was a wide four-lane highway, now it is a narrow road. The route from Magnitogorsk to Yuzhnouralsk is covered with snow. The traffic is organized in one lane, policemen let oncoming cars take turns. Clearing the trails is difficult. Especially where accidents happened. In order not to create traffic jams, restrictions are still in effect on a number of highways. Police squads are on duty at the borders of settlements. Travel - only by registration. Snow removal can take several days.
Climatologists noted that there had not been such cataclysms in the Chelyabinsk region for a long time. Something similar happened last time in the South Urals in the 80s of the last century.
And a few more figures. The Bredy station of the Chelyabinsk region was hit by a monthly volume of snow in just a day. In all the meteorological history, neither in January nor in February, this has not happened here. And in the village of Ozerny, Orenburg region, the snowdrifts doubled in 24 hours, usually such a layer is collected in only three and a half months.
The blizzard is caused by the collision of heat and cold. For example, in Bredy, even at the height of the day, there were 20-degree frosts, while 600 kilometers to the south, in Aralsk, there were zero thaws. Due to significant changes in air density, the wind accelerated to stormy 23-25 m / s and blizzards arose.
In general, this February is extremely snowy in many regions. In some places, two, or even almost four monthly volumes of precipitation have already fallen. And if in the XX century such anomalies were observed only once every 8-11 years, now they are 2-3 times more often.
