The first month of winter has been tough on Ukraine. Continuous snowfall has caused enormous traffic jams stretching up to 15 kilometers in some areas, while sub-zero temperatures have so far led to the death of 37 people this month, two of them in Kyiv.
“This is normal
weather for December, even though the previous winters were warmer,” said Lyudmila
Savchenko, head of the State Weather Service’s forecast department.
The Ministry of
Health reports that 18 people died of cold in just one day on Dec. 17 when the temperature
dropped to minus 13C. Of the 37 deaths, 28 were found dead on the street. It is
unknown if any of them were homeless. Four more people died of cold in their
own homes, and another five died in hospitals.
To prevent more deaths,
the Ministry of Emergencies pitched heated tents for homeless people all over
Ukraine, 10 of them in Kyiv alone. Hot tea and some meals also are provided in
the tents.
According to
Savchenko, in just three weeks of December Kyiv got as much snow as it usually
gets in two months. As a result city traffic slowed down significantly on Dec.
11-13. According to Heorhiy Hlinskiy, head of Kyiv roads service, quoted by
Forbes.ua online media, each day of snowfall costs the city budget Hr 1 million
in road cleaning.
For western and central
Ukraine, snow brought real danger. On Dec. 15 traffic flow came to a stop along
the Kyiv-Chop highway. At one point, the traffic jam stretched to over 20
kilometers, according to news reports. As of Dec. 18, the situation was still
complicated, even though the police and emergency services said they have taken
control of roads.
Dec. 16 was a very
dramatic day for 28-year-old Oksana Babinska from Kuti village in Lviv oblast. While
in labor, she failed to make it to the maternity hospital located in a
neighboring town in a car through the snow, and barely avoided giving birth in
a cold car.
“I was extremely
scared,” Babinska told to Kyiv Post. “Our car couldn’t make it through the
snowdrifts, and neither could the fire truck that came to help.”
When rescuers and
family saw the road was impassable, they decided to change destination and took
Babinska to a small hospital in nearby Yosipovka village. There, the woman gave
birth to twin girls, Daryna and Maria. The newborns were then moved to a hospital
in Lviv for better care. Babinska, who also has two older kids, feels good. She
left the hospital on Dec. 19.
Babinska might not
have been the only one in her ordeal. It was reported by media that another
woman whose name is unknown gave birth in the car while stuck in a traffic jam
on the highway in Lviv Oblast with doctors giving instructions to her husband over
the phone. According to Lviv’s State Administration, this case wasn’t confirmed
yet.
It could be true
though, as witness says the jam made cars stop for hours.
“It took us 12 hours
to get from Lviv to Kyiv, instead of the normal six hours,” says Dmitry Zhuk,
who was stuck in the jam near the town of Brody in Lviv Oblast in a car with
his family for several hours on Dec. 17. “We spent at least four hours in the
jam, standing or moving extremely slow.”
Based on what he saw
on the highway, Zhuk says the jam was mostly caused by big trucks that could
hardly make it through the hard part of highway near Brody in nasty weather.
“There were literally
thousands of trucks, waiting in line, blocking part of the highway. The
snowfall had almost stopped [by the time we were in the jam], strong winds were
bringing snow from snowdrifts to the road,” Zhuk says.
According to weather
forecasts, Ukraine’s cold days won’t expire soon. Temperatures are expected to drop
to minus 25C before the end of December.
Kyiv Post staff writer Olga Rudenko can be reached at [email protected].
Addresses
of cold shelters in Kyiv:
3B
Koshitsya St.
12B
Dovzhenko St.
7 Kasiana
St.
69/1
Peremohy Ave.
1
Kibalchiha St.
37
Svitlytskoho St.
6
Malynovskoho St.
4A
Zhukova St.
12
Umanska St.
Spivoche Pole
Park, Lavrska Street, near Kyiv Pechersk Lavra
