Meteorologists warned of a partly extreme storm situation – and that came in the form of snow and black ice. The center and south of Germany were particularly badly affected:
A van driver was killed in an accident on a slippery road in the Eifel region on Wednesday. The 34-year-old drove his vehicle off the road in a curve near Bauler (Rhineland-Palatinate) and crashed into a tree, the police in Bitburg said. The man died at the scene of the accident.
The police in Trier reported a traffic jam on the A64 because the neighboring country of Luxembourg no longer allowed heavy traffic in – the trucks were backed up and diverted to parking spaces. The winter weather also caused problems for the border region in France. There were accidents and traffic disruptions in Alsace and Lorraine, and trucks were banned from driving on main traffic axes.
In Saarland, the police had already counted more than 100 traffic accidents around midday. On the icy A8 near Karlsbad in the Karlsruhe district of Baden-Württemberg, a driver escaped with minor injuries when she lost control of her car and the car rolled over.
Due to the traffic situation, schools remained closed in some places, for example in Darmstadt. The city explained that they do not want to expose students to unnecessary health risks on the way to school and also reduce the volume of traffic in the city, “in order to defuse the situation for the fire department, emergency services and hospitals.”
Air traffic was also affected. Due to freezing rain, aircraft take-offs at Germany’s largest airport in Frankfurt were temporarily suspended on Wednesday afternoon. The operator Fraport justified this by saying that the machines could no longer be safely de-iced before take-off due to persistent freezing rain. In any case, hundreds of flights had already been canceled in Frankfurt.
In view of the decreasing rainfall, individual aircraft have been able to take off from Frankfurt Airport again since Wednesday afternoon.
Rail traffic in parts of Germany was also severely hindered. There are delays and cancellations in regional and long-distance transport, a spokeswoman for Deutsche Bahn (DB) announced on Wednesday afternoon. Bus and rail replacement services are also severely restricted in some regions due to the formation of black ice. As a precautionary measure, the railway limited the maximum speed of its ICE trains to 200 km/h. This caused further disruption nationwide. A number of ICE connections from Frankfurt or Stuttgart to Paris were completely canceled.
According to the DWD, the reason for the severe weather situation was a sharp air mass boundary over the middle of Germany, which separates cold air in the north from very mild sea air in the south.
With a view to extreme black ice for the next few days, the DWD gave the all-clear. “At the weekend we can look forward to cold winter weather with sunshine,” it said.
