PARIS – Snow on the roof of a Terminal 2E at Paris Charles de Gaulle airport caused evacuation of 2,000 people on Friday, according to the airport source.
Agence France-Presse reports that people remained calm during the evacuation of Terminal 2E, described as a precautionary measure taken because of around 60 centimetres (two feet) of accumulated snow on the roof.
Emergency workers were deployed to clear the roof, a task expected to last until around 1400 GMT, the source said.
Airport authorities denied there had been an evacuation.
“We simply asked passengers to move away from the area above which the accumulation of snow is,” said Bernard Cathelin, the deputy head of airport authority ADP, declining to say how many people were involved.
According to AFP, a few weeks after the terminal was opened in 2004, a section of the roof of the architecturally ambitious building designed by Frenchman Paul Andreu collapsed, killing four foreign travellers and injuring six others.
Around 2,000 stranded travellers spent Thursday night at Charles de Gaulle, the French capital’s main airport, after hundreds of flights were cancelled because of icy weather gripping much of western Europe.
Civil aviation authorities said that around 35 percent of flights on Friday afternoon would be cancelled, with many passengers running the risk of spending the night, when the French traditionally see in Christmas Day with much festivity, trapped at the airport.
