CIRCULATION
National road 118 connecting Les Ulis (Essonne) to the south-west of Paris, with marked slopes and many turns, was also completely closed to traffic from 10 p.m. Tuesday by the prefect.
Orders suspending school transport all or part of the day on Wednesday have been taken in Brittany (Morbihan, Côtes-d’Armor, Ille-et-Vilaine) and in Normandy, Alsace and Lorraine, as well as in several departments from Ile-de-France.
In addition to road and potentially train traffic, air traffic also risked being “severely disrupted” on Wednesday departing from and arriving at the Paris airports of Orly and Roissy-Charles De Gaulle, according to the Directorate General of the civil aviation (DGAC).
“Around 25% of flights at Orly will be canceled this Wednesday and around 20% of flights at Roissy,” said Transport Minister Clément Beaune. The latter also called for “privileging teleworking”.
In Paris, the municipality told AFP that its services, “to anticipate and better manage this snowy episode”, on Tuesday followingnoon “triggered salting operations throughout Paris to treat a network of 600 km of priority lanes: lanes used by buses, cycle paths, sloping lanes, major lanes, fast lanes (ring road and its ramps, Quai de Bercy)”.
“The risk of slippery phenomena is high in all departments in orange, with uncertainty regarding the exact nature of the precipitation,” warned Météo-France in its bulletin on Tuesday evening.
Bad weather that hit part of the country overnight from Monday to Tuesday severely disrupted road and rail traffic in Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes and Lozère, while three people died in Burgundy in separate road accidents.
In Saône-et-Loire, a motorist died following hitting a heavy goods vehicle on the A39 linking Dijon to Bourg-en-Bresse (Ain), the firefighters said. And two truck drivers died in the frontal collision of their trucks on the RD 975, at the exit of Romenay.
“Despite the uninterrupted rotation of the salting machines”, a phenomenon of “slippery roads” had caused the closure for several hours of traffic on the A7 motorway between Bourg-lès-Valence and Tain-l’Hermitage (Drôme) in direction of Lyon, according to Vinci Autoroutes.
Many traffic jams have also been observed on the main axes of the Rhône-Alpes-Auvergne region, according to Bison Futé.
In the metropolis of Lyon, all the buses had remained at the depot for a good part of Tuesday morning to avoid accidents.
For the TER, the weather conditions had “impacted all the lines in the region (Tuesday) morning” with “many delays and deletions”, according to the SNCF.
