BERLIN, Nov 26: Unusually harsh winter weather conditions gripped parts of northern Europe on Saturday, leading to power failures, cancelled flights and traffic chaos on icy highways.

A quarter of a million people were without electricity in Germany’s most populous state of North-Rhine Westphalia (NRW), authorities said on Saturday.

Snow and ice also affected flights in and out of the airport at Duesseldorf, the NRW state capital. Thirty-six flights had to be redirected and 25 were cancelled, an airport spokesman said.

“I have been working at the airport for 11 years and I cannot remember something like this ever happening before,” spokesman Torsten Hiermann said.

A spokesman for France’s Aeroports de Paris said 23 flights from Charles de Gaulle airport were cancelled because of snow on the runways. Other flights were experiencing delays of 45 minutes.

In Paris, the Eiffel Tower was temporarily closed to the public at mid-morning because the stairs and platforms were too slippery for visitors.

The Paris region saw about five centimetres of snow and in northwestern France there was up to 10cms.

Officials said the real danger however was extreme cold.

The French government declared a level two state of alert — decreed when daytime temperatures remain negative and sink to between -5 and -10C at night — under its Winter Plan to protect the homeless for just over a third of the country.

That came after two homeless people died in France over the past 48 hours due to the intense cold.

A spokeswoman for French utility Electricite de France said 7,000 homes were still without power as workers battled freezing temperatures all night to restore power to 17,000 homes in France’s Vendee region, south of Brittany.

Traffic snarled across France, with 120 semi-trailers still blocked at midday on the road from the coast to the Breton capital of Rennes in France’s northwest. Some 200 semi-trailers had been stuck there earlier in the day.

Heavy snowfall and biting Arctic winds also prompted travel chaos in parts of Britain as people struggled with the cold snap that stranded motorists overnight, caused short-term power cuts and stretched the emergency services.

In southwestern England up to 500 people were forced to spend the night in temporary shelters after they were rescued from their vehicles stuck on exposed Bodmin Moor in Cornwall.

By midmorning Saturday slightly higher temperatures triggered a thaw, raising the risk of flash flooding. Britain’s Met Office said more snow was forecast for the extreme north, while most of the country will face rain and sleet showers. —Reuters