Massive masses of snow – Southern Austria: almost 10,000 households without power

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No relaxation in southern Austria: the heavy snowfall still holds Carinthia and Styria in an icy grip. In Lower and Central Carinthia, about 5,000 households were without power on Tuesday and 4,000 households in Styria. The helpers are still at work on a large scale.

On the night of Tuesday, 140 technicians from the state energy supplier Kelag in Carinthia were working to repair the damage and restore the electricity. In Western Styria, incidents were recorded at almost 190 transformer substations.

Several roads in southern and western Styria were closed due to fallen trees. Chains were mandatory on some higher-lying roads, including in the northeast of Upper Styria. The Südsteirische Grenzstrasse (B69) in particular suffered from the amount of snow, as did the Packer Strasse (B70) towards Carinthia. There were also problems on the Grenzland-Weinstraße (L613) and the Schlossberger Landesstraße (L659) on Tuesday morning – mainly due to fallen trees or snow on the road.

“No snow” for schoolchildren in the Völkermarkt district
In Carinthia, the snowfall had decreased during the night, but on Tuesday morning a few centimeters of fresh snow fell locally. The risk of snow breakage was still high due to the large amounts of wet, heavy snowfall. Schools in the Völkermarkt district and in the municipalities of Lavamünd and Preitenegg (Wolfsberg district) remained closed on Tuesday, the way to school was sometimes simply too dangerous, authorities said. Crisis teams gathered in the particularly hard-hit districts.

The fire brigade in Carinthia had to turn out for hundreds of operations since Monday morning, about 2100 firefighters were deployed. Usually it was necessary to recover jammed trucks, such as on the Drautal trunk road (B100). Some car accidents involving body damage and minor injuries were also recorded, police said.

Danger too great – emergency services stopped working
Another focus of operations was trees that had fallen under the snow load and blocked roads. There was also an enormous amount of weight on the roofs of houses due to the wet snow. As a precaution, one building was even evacuated because drywall had broken under the load. The work of the emergency services even had to be stopped overnight because the situation was simply too dangerous for the emergency services.

As before, the alert level in southern Austria was raised for the time being – but precipitation would gradually decrease over the course of the day.

Source: Krone

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