“A step to the side – a snowdrift”: Muscovites shared their impressions of extreme snowfall

Forecasters report that 35% of the monthly precipitation fell in Moscow in one day, and about 56% in the Moscow region. This morning many people faced difficulties while trying to get to work.

However, zero temperatures on November 27 are doing their job – the snow cover that formed in the capital in the morning and caused so many difficulties for utility workers and citizens, gradually turns into dirty slurry, and then it all freezes…

The weather in general is behaving somewhat like a hooligan: heavy snow, according to forecasters, will continue to fall on November 27 in Moscow until about lunchtime, then a thaw is expected, and by night it will freeze again. That is, residents of the capital and region will experience sleet and, most likely, freezing rain. Which is no better than heavy snowfall.

Residents of the capital joke a lot about the topic of “unexpected” snow: “We have heavy snowfalls every year, like the first time,” Muscovite Natalya expressed the opinion of the majority on social networks. – And there is always a lack of technology. It’s as if we live in the desert, and snow is something incredible and unpredictable.” Others are understanding: “We can’t expect instant cleanup from such vast areas.”

Difficulties for many this morning began immediately upon leaving the entrance.

“Today it’s absolutely disgusting, what’s going on, nothing has been cleaned, be it the roadway or the pedestrian way. Let’s get the skis! – Karina, a resident of Northern Tushino, residential complex Life Skhodnenskaya, joked gloomily in a conversation with MK. – The pedestrian paths have not been cleared – we walk through snowdrifts, only the exit from the entrance under the door has been cleared (the stairs have not been cleared). I had to go on business, I left at 7:50, walked from the entrance to the barrier of our residential complex and called a taxi to the metro, although it usually takes 10 minutes to walk there. I walked inside our residential complex along the ruts of car wheels, because the pedestrian path was blocked! Last year it was the same thing, no matter where we complained…

In the city center, sidewalks are cleared of snow faster.

– I barely made it through the snowdrifts at 7 am here; There was a traffic jam on our street already at 6:45! Although it usually starts at 8. And in the center, in the Pokrovka area, I already went to work at 8:00 along the cleared streets,” testifies one of the residents of the Timiryazevsky district.

The residents of Khimki had a lot of sadness this morning: “I don’t know where, how, but in Khimki it’s just terrible! – said Olga, a resident of the district. “They don’t clean anything at all, I haven’t seen a snow blower on the roads, people are wandering in their yards along roads that have been rolled out by cars. A step to the side is a snowdrift!”

There are videos filmed near Moscow City, where pedestrians have to go out onto the roadway because the sidewalks are not cleared of snow.

During the very morning “rush hour,” when people were rushing to work, the capital’s department of transport issued a warning: “Ground transport in different areas of Moscow may be delayed due to worsening weather.” Moscow public pages are filled with videos evidence of morning difficulties with public transport.

Somewhere there are queues at stops almost a kilometer long! For example, people reported a transport collapse in the Leninsky urban district, the Vostochnoye Butovo residential complex and the Prigorod Lesnoye residential complex, where huge queues at bus stops accumulated due to traffic jams, residents could not leave their area for work. There is a video showing people with great difficulty getting off the bus at a bus stop on Leningradsky Prospekt, wading through knee-deep snow porridge; the elderly women are helped by other passengers, otherwise they would not have been able to cope. “The roads were cleared, but the snow was not removed from the sides,” people complain.

In principle, it was only possible to get to work this morning using your legs (lucky those who have work within walking distance) – it was difficult to get there by taxi not only because of traffic jams, but also because of wildly soaring prices!

People got off the buses and walked to the stations.

For Alexey, a resident of the village. Brekhovo (city of Khimki) and working in Moscow, today’s journey to work was extremely thorny: instead of the usual hour, it took him four and a half!

– I left home for work at 7:00 today, and got there by 11:30! – Alexey shared with MK. – Bus number 400 from my stop Vakhneyevka (city of Khimki) to the stop “Kutuzovskaya Sloboda” took 2.5 hours, and usually it takes 20 minutes! At the Kutuzovskaya Sloboda stop, half a bus got off, and people walked (15 minutes!) to Kryukovo station (from there you can get to Petrovsko-Razumovskaya metro station), because there was no point in going further. The bus traveled 300 meters from stop to stop for 40 minutes! There was another route ahead of us. Many people came out there too. You know, when it snows, we generally begin to collapse…

But even when people had great difficulty getting to the metro, at some “outer” stations, due to the number of passengers, they had to wait a long time for the opportunity to board the car.

– The steps towards exit 6 in the Chertanovskaya metro were covered with a thick layer of ice and snow, and when I went down, I had to wait 15 minutes for free cars (they were more and more crowded with each flight), so I was almost late for work because behind this congestion,” a resident of the area told us. – In time it was 7:45-8:05.

But there is also good news. Domodedovo resident Matvey proudly told MK that he was extremely surprised that their sidewalks and roads “were cleaned in the morning!” But in the VDNKh area there are “problems,” and in the park itself, on the territory of which the man works, “it’s absolutely terrible, you can’t get through.” But by 12:30, as Matvey saw, “the main (road) roads inside VDNKh had already been cleaned, but the pedestrian ones were still being cleaned.”

Those whose flights were delayed early in the morning due to bad weather experienced unpleasant minutes and even hours. More than 40 flights were delayed and four more were canceled due to snowfall at Vnukovo, Domodedovo and Sheremetyevo. By 8 a.m., the Federal Air Transport Agency had already reported: “Sheremetyevo, Domodedovo and Vnukovo airports are operating normally amid heavy snowfall, Zhukovsky is closed from 6:00 for runway cleaning.”

Meanwhile, according to forecasts, Moscow will have the snowiest start to December in the last 70 years. By the end of this week, the snow depth will be almost 32 cm. The last time the record was recorded was in 1952, when the snow height at the same time was 27 cm.

However, this makes many Muscovites happy: “Winter-winter!!! She’s back! Frosty, snowy!” they share on social networks. Others sadly joke: “And by the New Year all this will melt away!”