A woman has died after being trapped overnight in a bus on a road that was closed due to unusually heavy snowfalls which have been affecting its eastern part since Friday South Africathe authorities announced today.

Traffic has been interrupted for about 30 kilometers, especially on the N3 highway, one of the main roads in the country, connecting the Johannesburg with the east coast city of Durban, the road’s sponsoring company said today.

A 39-year-old woman died of hypothermia in hospital yesterday after spending the night between Friday and Saturday stranded on the road with other passengers in a minivan taxi, the Roland Robertsonan executive of emergency services company Midlands EMS.

Travelers were stranded near the city furnitureapproximately 430 kilometers from Johannesburg. “They stayed in the cold all night, without blankets, without anything. They weren’t prepared for that,” Robertson told the television network ENCA.

Passenger rescue operations are continuing in very difficult conditions today, particularly around the Van Reenen Pass in the Drakensberg Mountains, about 330 kilometers south-east of Johannesburg, the N3’s sponsoring company said.

Some vehicles were removed from the area of ​​the jam, but other cars, abandoned by drivers and passengers and unable to start due to breakdowns, are complicating the work of graders sent there to remove the snow and rescuers trying to find people who remain stranded, the company’s operations manager Tanya Doogra told ENCA, speaking of an “impenetrable”, huge traffic jam of vehicles that have stopped “at about 30 kilometers”.

Authorities cannot say today how many people or vehicles remain stranded on the roads.