The Limited Times

Now you can see non-English news...

This is how Madrid 'Filomena' froze: up to 80% fewer movements and two weeks to recover normality

2021-02-12T14:07:21.603Z


A month after the snowfall, a study shows that the snow especially collapsed in the southeast of the Community and locked the citizens in their home as during the first confinement


The city of Madrid, surrounded by pollution and snow.PEDRO ARMESTRE / EFE

There was no applause at 8:00 p.m., no

DJs

on the balconies, but

Filomena's

snow

achieved in early January 2021 the same as the fear of the coronavirus in March 2020: the first working day after the historic snowfall that drowned Madrid with up to 50 centimeters of snow left as few displacements in the region as there were when the Government Central ordered the confinement of all citizens to combat the spread of the pandemic.

This average decrease of 65% in the mobility of the rush hour of Monday, January 11 in the morning (compared to December 14) is the main conclusion of a study by Nommon, a Spanish technology company that works with anonymized mobile data to record travel of more than 500 meters and establish mobility patterns.

But not the only one.

Just a month after the big snowfall, these are the data that photograph how Filomena Madrid froze

The first warning came on Thursday the 7th, when the children were still playing with the gifts of the Magi: a white cloak covered the capital and the region, and summoned thousands of walkers on the morning of the 8th, when parks and streets were filled with citizens ready to enjoy the snow.

Everything accelerated during the afternoon of that Friday, when Filomena arrived to hit Madrid with all her strength.

It was 30 straight hours of snowfall.

An almost unprecedented continuum of flakes in the region that reduced trips by 45% compared to the average of the weekends before the pandemic.

And then, the never seen: after all of Saturday 9 snowing, Sunday 10 ended with blocked roads, hundreds of cars stranded on the shoulders of the highways and millions of employees without knowing how they could go to their jobs the next day .

It was a region fighting collapse.

“The first working day after the storm, on Monday, January 11, registered a total number of trips similar to that registered on Monday in March 2020, in full house confinement: around 10 million trips (an average less than 2 trips per inhabitant) throughout the day ”, details the Nommon report.

"This volume of trips is approximately half of those registered in a working week before the outbreak of the pandemic, and 40% lower than that registered on the last Monday in December prior to the Christmas holidays", he adds.

"In this sense, the drop in percentage terms was even higher than that of the weekend."

  • The Community left nine snowplows unused

  • Right and left criticize Almeida's management

  • Díaz Ayuso against all for Filomena's management

But Filomena did not affect all the cities in the region equally.

To the southeast of the Community, time was paralyzed, and everything stopped.

The drop in mobility was greater than 80% in parts of that area.

A reflection of the dependence on the roads in some of these towns, far from the Cercanías train stations, and orphaned by the Metro, the means of transport that helped maintain activity in the capital.

There, and in the rest of the region, normality was frozen for two weeks.

While pedestrians risked their lives walking on the roads, with the sidewalks conquered by snow, cars tried to make their way, and families, to organize the chaos that meant that classes were suspended for more than a week.

The classrooms reopened on Wednesday the 20th. It was a boom: the reopening caused 300,000 more trips between 6 and 10 in the morning from one day to the next.

Boosted by the return to classes, on Friday the 22nd, two weeks after Filomena's arrival, mobility recovered levels comparable to those of Friday, December 18.

However, there were also differences in that.

The citizens of the southern districts of Madrid began to move before those of the north.

Thus, a week after the snowfall, trips originating in Usera were only 19% lower than those on the Friday before Christmas, while in Chamberí the figure rose to 30%.

“While on Monday the 11th the southern and northern districts of Madrid reduced their mobility early in the morning in a similar manner compared to the average for the Community as a whole, the rest of the days the reduction was greater in the northern districts , very possibly due to the fact that the work profile of the residents in these areas offers more opportunities for teleworking ”, say the authors of the study, who detail that the residents of Usera were already moving as they did before the snowfall on Thursday 21st.

"It was a tsunami," said the mayor of the capital, José Luis Martínez Almeida, in the worst moments.

"The snowfall has tripled the forecasts," said the president of the Community, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, despite the fact that meteorologists warned that the rainfall would be historical already in December.

A month after those words, there is no snow on the streets of Madrid, which are still full of broken branches that cut off the path after breaking under the weight of Filomena. The environmental effects (with millions of destroyed trees) of the storm will only be known in the long term. The same occurs with the economic consequences of a management that left the region paralyzed for several days, and without regaining its usual mobility for two weeks. In the meantime, one thing is for sure: when the locals left the weekend playing in the snow behind and wanted to go to work, they couldn't move their cars.

Source: elparis

All news articles on 2021-02-12

You may like

Trends 24h

Latest

© Communities 2019 - Privacy

The information on this site is from external sources that are not under our control.
The inclusion of any links does not necessarily imply a recommendation or endorse the views expressed within them.