Monday, 31 January
Due to Sunday storm in Murmansk, the holiday "Welcome, sun", which signifies the end of the Polar Night was cancelled. As the representatives of the municipal administration noticed, during its long history it was the first time, when the holiday was cancelled due to weather conditions Visibility on roads was extremely bad. Due to snowdrifts the traffic on some parts of the roads was blocked. The most serious situation was on the road "St. Petersburg – Murmansk". Near town Monchegorsk occurred the traffic jam, because snow-clearing machines didn’t manage to remove such amount of snow. According to Ministry of Emergency Affairs, a few cars, with two little children (4 and 2 years of age), were blocked on the road due to snowdrifts. By now the rescuers managed to bring two families with the kids to Monchegorsk, and rescuer measures continue. Till this moment nothing serious, connected with the storm, happened in the region.
On Sunday in Murmansk was held the awarding ceremony of the winners of the 5th international festival of ice sculpture "Snow fantasy". Due to storm the organizers had to hold the ceremony not on the Five Corners’ Square, but in one of the restaurants in Murmansk. 11 teams took part in the festival. During 5 days they managed to create real pieces of art from ice. This year the only one foreign team was team from Byelorussia. Their sculpture "Head of fish" gained the prize of Murmansk jury. As the representative of municipal administration noticed, when the team was nominated, it was taken into consideration, that they had made some fish from ice and let them swim in the sea. The winners of the festival became citizens of Murmansk, their composition "Frozen summer" was declared the most unusual and they got grand-pre prize. The first prize was given to sculptures from Monchegorsk for ice sculpture "Dance of the North." As the organizers of the festival admitted, there were no participants who didn’t win. All teams got different prizes, including the prize of participants itself, prize of the children’s jury, prize from the press and so on. The first Mayor of Murmansk Oleg Naydenov, who died on The 22nd of May 2003 after serious disease, created the festival. The festival "Snow Fantasy" has been organized since 1999. And masters from Sweden, Finland, Byelorussia and different other cities of Russia have participated in it.
