An early cold snap in Europe claimed more lives Saturday,and a wildcat strike by Spanish air traffic controllers added to the travel chaos caused by snow, ice, and in some countries flooding.
Freezing weather killed another nine people in Poland over a 24-hour period, bringing the last toll there to 46 since the source of November, police said.
Temperatures there dropped as low as minus 19 degrees Celsius (minus 2 Fahrenheit) overnight Friday.
In the neighbouring Czech Republic, it was minus 20 Celsius (minus 4 Fahrenheit) overnight, disrupting rail traffic as the ice seized up signals at several junctions.
French police blamed icy driving conditions for three deaths in the eastward of the land after a car slid off the route and into a channel near Plobsheim late Friday. Neither the driver nor the passengers had been drinking, police added.
Weather forecasters warned of black ice in northern France that would make driving particularly dangerous.
Officials in the French Alps meanwhile warned to follow for avalanches on Sunday in ski stations already open because of the other snow. The risk would increase Monday with fresh snowfalls and a subsequent thaw, they added.
The ceiling of a building at the Flamanville nuclear power station in northern France partially collapsed under the burden of snow overnight Friday, power company EDF said.
The building contained about 10 barrels of low-level radioactive waste, but France's nuclear safety agency, the ASN, classed the incident one on a plate of seven, at the seat of the scale of seriousness.
Civil aviation officials asked airlines flying out of Charles de Gaulle, Paris' main airport, to cut back their flights by 20 percent during daylight to alleviate the force caused by the snow and ice there.
In Spain, the interruption to air traffic came chiefly from a wildcat strike by air traffic controllers, which ran from Friday to Saturday evening, hitting an estimated 300,000 passengers over a long holiday weekend.
The administration there put the military in control of the skies and threatened to pursue the strikers, who had called in sick en masse rather than staging a formal strike. By Saturday afternoon, they were reverting to work.
Britain's Transport Secretary Phil Hammond relaxed the maximum-hours restrictions for lorry drivers to prevent the country's vital supplies moving.
"This will assist us with deliveries of fuel, it will serve supermarket chains with their deliveries to their stores and it will help with deliveries of salt around the country," he said.
The frosty weather has disrupted road, rail and air travel in Britain concluded the preceding few days. In many parts of England and Wales however, the snows were melting away.
Ski resorts in Scotland warned of the adventure of avalanches, but the thaw there was also helping rail traffic, badly disrupted by the recent snow, to slowly get back on track.
In Switzerland, Geneva's University Hospital cancelled non-urgent operations scheduled for Monday and Tuesday to deal with a massive stream of broken bones caused by people slipping and falling in icy conditions. Operating theatres were working overtime through the weekend.
Stay tuned, a lot going on across Europe right now.
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