Snow storms stop Aussies getting home for Christmas

DEANE Raseta is among hundreds of Australians stranded in Europe today.

Heavy snow has brought London to a standstill.

DEANE Raseta is among hundreds of Australians stranded in Europe today.

She has been prevented from getting home for Christmas by ice and snow that have killed at least seven people and immobilised the biggest European airports.

After spending 14 hours at Heathrow over the weekend, Ms Raseta managed to find her luggage and headed back to her flat in London last night.

She had been due to fly out on Saturday on a Cathay Pacific flight bound for Perth, where her family and friends are waiting to spend Christmas with her, but she never made it off the ground.

Instead, Ms Raseta, a 33-year-old communications manager for an asset management firm based in London, spent six hours sitting on board the plane after the British Airports Association, which owns Heathrow and Gatwick airports, cancelled all flights owing to the bombardment of snow that has hit Britain and paralysed its transport networks in recent days.

"Our pilot was explaining that we need to de-ice our plane, but then they ran out of de-ice liquid," Ms Raseta told The Australian. "Then we needed to get the snow plough to remove the snow from the taxi area so we could move our plane, but the plough got bogged (down). It was like a sauna on the plane - I felt really sorry for people with children."

The scene inside the Heathrow terminal was mayhem, she said.

"People were lying everywhere. One family I met were supposed to be on a refuelling stop from South Africa - they only had bikinis and shorts with them and now they're stuck in London in the snow."

In the hope she might get lucky yesterday morning, Ms Raseta and her husband, Alan, headed back to Heathrow, but found the airport shut down. "My family had planned a special Christmas for me and my husband, and it's also my grandmother's 80th birthday. Now I have no idea if we're going to get home."

No planes were arriving at Heathrow yesterday, and the outlook is unclear for today. Airlines have told passengers they will have priority when flights resume, but there is a huge backlog of missed departures and the schedule is booked until Christmas.

Hundreds of flights out of Britain, Germany, France, Spain, The Netherlands and Denmark were cancelled or delayed over the weekend as fresh snow blocked runways, adding to disruption caused by unusually early and heavy snowfalls that now stretch from northern Europe to most of the Mediterranean coast. In Italy, at least three people died in snow-related incidents in a space of just 24 hours.

The victims included a driver whose truck overturned in a highway pile-up, a man who suffered a heart-attack shovelling snow and a homeless man who froze to death.

Four people in Britain were killed in traffic accidents caused by the weather. In Lancashire, northwest England, hundreds had to spend the night in their cars after an accident blocked the main north-south motorway.

In London, Heathrow airport, the world's busiest international passenger hub, closed both runways until at least last night to clear the snow. London Gatwick Airport closed its runway for several hours.

British singer Lily Allen was among those inconvenienced, posting a series of increasingly angry Twitter messages as she tried for about six hours to get on a flight out of Heathrow, before announcing: "Guess we're all kipping here."

Flights were also grounded at Stansted and Luton airports near London, as well as at Birmingham and Southampton.

Temperatures dropped as low as -17C north of Norwich in eastern England.

Horse races and dozens of soccer games in England and Scotland were called off, including a high-profile match in London between Chelsea and Manchester United.

Frankfurt airport, Germany's biggest, said it had kept its runways clear of ice, but many planes could not take off because airports at several key European destinations, including in Croatia and Pisa in Italy, were closed. "Our timetables are an utter shambles," said an airport spokesman.

The icy weather swept over large parts of Scandinavia, causing problems particularly in Denmark, where dozens of flights were cancelled at the airport in Copenhagen. According to Danish news agency Ritzau, train traffic between Denmark and southern Sweden was also disrupted because of track problems.

Sweden was expected to suffer the coldest winter this early in the season since the mid-1800s.

Additional reporting: Agencies