PARIS, Jan 5: A rare snowstorm immobilized Paris and the surrounding Ile-de-France region on Saturday night.

The storm deposited loads of snow and ice on major roads, stranding motorists in their cars for most of the night, and shutting down traffic at Roissy Charles de Gaulle airport.

The storm began on Saturday morning, continued for most of the day and night, and on Sunday denizens of Paris and its vicinity woke up to a rare snowfall.

About 15,000 motorists on an expressway leading to Paris were stranded in their cars, some for over a dozen hours, and had to be rescued by police and gendarmes.

At Roissy-Charles de Gaulle airport, where more than 100 flights were cancelled, traffic resumed on Sunday morning.

The freak storm caught most Parisians unprepared, and as the city and its suburbs have little in the way of snowplows or salt with which to melt down ice, hundreds of people were rushed to hospitals after falls on the area’s icebound sidewalks.

Agencies add:

Flights leaving Charles de Gaulle airport were subject to delays between 90 minutes and two hours, while passengers at Orly airport, south of the French capital, faced delays of two to three hours.

“There are still lots of passengers waiting” at Charles de Gaulle, one airport source said, adding that passengers who were kept from departing on Saturday due to the weather would be given priority.

On France’s motorways, thousands of travellers were stuck for hours in some 125 kilometres of backups on Saturday, some through much of the night.

Traffic ground to a complete halt on sections of two national highways south of the capital due to patches of black ice that caused trucks to skid and block several lanes.