Frozen and forsaken

80 people in Orenburg say they were nearly left for dead, trapped on a highway in a snowstorm

Dozens of people were trapped in their cars on the highway between Orenburg and Orsk, when a powerful snowstorm hit on the night of January 3. Motorists say they were stuck on the road, freezing in their vehicles, for almost 16 hours, though local emergency workers claim they responded much sooner. According to officials, one person didn't survive the ordeal, apparently succumbing to hypothermia. On January 6, the television network Dozhd published a special report on this incident. Meduza summarizes that text here.

Emergency workers in Orenburg say the snowstorm halted traffic along roughly 40 kilometers (25 miles) of highway. The next day, January 4, officials rescued more than 80 people stuck on the road, confined to their cars.

Officials told Dozhd television that rescuers found the body of one man on the highway's shoulder. The man apparently froze to death. Tatiana Samoilova, the spokesperson for Russia's Ministry of Emergency Situations in Orenburg, told Dozhd that a full garrison of rescuers was alerted and dispatched the moment the first distress calls started rolling in from the highway.

Stranded motorists tell a different story, however, saying they waited 16 hours before help arrived. When it did come, drivers tell Dozhd, all that arrived was a tractor and a truck.

Samoilova contends that motorists weren't able to see the full crew of rescue workers, due to low visibility during the storm. She says a whole column of rescuers worked behind the tractor, ahead of a whole array of special equipment. After evacuating people to temporary accommodations, workers set about clearing the cars and snow from the road, Samoilova explains.

One woman caught on the highway in the storm told Dozhd that a snowplow arrived earlier in the evening, around 8 p.m. After it cleared the road, traffic resumed, only to come to a complete halt once again. “Nobody saw the plow again after that,” the woman said. “When people's fuel started running out, they moved to cars that still had some gasoline left. In one of the cars, people were burning everything they could: the upholstery, their personal things. There was an old woman who suffered a stroke.”

According to Dozhd's eyewitness, one of the other women caught in the storm was bringing home a newborn child from a maternity ward in Orenburg. “Just think of sitting there and watching the fuel gauge fall lower and lower, and in your arms is a small baby,” she told Dozhd. “Naturally, I started calling every rescue service, telling them that they'd find the video I'd recorded showing how everything happened, if we died out there.”