Snowdrifts reach 20 cm in height within one night in Novogrudok
Last week those who missed snowfalls this winter must have been pleasantly surprised as Grodno, Minsk, Mogilev, and Vitebsk regions were covered with a ‘white blanket’ within just one night. It snowed till the morning. As a result, on January 17 Minsk, for example, saw precipitation that accounted for about 30 percent of the monthly norm.
“The height of snowdrifts reached 25-28 centimeters in Minsk. Yet it was the second highest result while the record was broken by the town of Novogrudok where January 17 in the night the snow depth increased by 20 centimeters, reaching 30,” says Ludmila Paraschuk, chief forecaster of the National Weather Service.
Unlike snow fans, road services do not like winter gifts of the kind.
“More than 700 vehicles were cleaning roads across the country at 6 am on that day. Next day this number increased to one thousand units. Roads in Minsk, Mogilev and Grodno regions suffered from the snowstorm most,” says Alexey Pekun, spokesman of Belavtodor department of the Transport Ministry.
Minsk region where snowfall turned from moderate into heavy saw the serious consequences.
“The heaviest snowfall was in the north-eastern part of the region. For instance, in Logoisk and Borisov districts the height of snow increased by 6 cm within just one night,” says Alexander Zaitsev, chief of Minskavtodor-Center dispatch service.
Presently, more than 170 snow removal vehicles clean snow in the region. As for Minsk, more than 1.4 thousand vehicles cleaned snow in the city the ‘great snowfall day’, 1148 of them worked at night, too.
The speed limit temporarily set for Minsk ring road is 70 km/h. 26 people were injured because of glazed frost in Minsk that day.
According to forecasters, snowfalls will be weakening from now on, but severe frosts will come after the cyclone.
