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CHANGSHA: Three weeks into the worst winter weather crisis in five
decades, heavy fog added to the misery as it shrouded parts of
central China’s Hunan Province on Sunday, delaying flights and
bringing road traffic to a standstill. In the capital city of
Changsha, visibility was reduced to 50 meters on Sunday morning.
The provincial meteorological station said that
the fog, which hovered over the central and northern parts of the
province, was likely to persist until early afternoon.
The fog, plus ice on the roads, closed highways
and brought city center traffic to a standstill in the morning rush
hour.
Sunday was a normal business day in China this
week, and the working population was told to “save” the weekend
in order to take seven days off during the Lunar Chinese New Year,
which starts on Wednesday.
Not a single flight left the Huanghua
International Airport in Changsha before 10 a.m.
The provincial weather bureau has warned that
the severe weather would persist, with more snow or sleet forecast
for Monday and Tuesday.
It said that the minimum temperature averaged
minus 4 degrees Celsius on Sunday and highways to the mountainous
regions in the western and southern areas remained icy.
Heavy fog also enveloped the central eastern
provinces of Anhui and Jiangxi and the southwestern Guizhou
Province, according to the Central Meteorological Bureau.
Meanwhile, workers continued removing ice from
the roads to smooth the traffic flow.
A bus carrying 30 children, aged from 2 to 16,
was stranded on the pivotal expressway linking Beijing and Zhuhai in
the southern Guangdong Province for eight days. The group was only
able to board a train to Guangzhou on Friday.
The children left their homes in the central
province of Hubei on January 24 to spend the Chinese New Year with
their parents, who work in the southern “boom towns” of Shenzhen,
Zhuhai and Dongguan. The journey, which usually takes 15 hours,
lasted until Saturday, when volunteers from the South China
Metropolitan News helped arrange family reunions.
Rail service in Guangzhou could start to return
to normal on Sunday with 100 trains scheduled to depart, close to
the usual number, the Guangzhou Railway Group said.
Trains carried more than 120,000 stranded
passengers out of Guangzhou between 6 p.m. Saturday and 6 a.m. on
Sunday. At one point last week, more than 600,000 people were
stranded at the Guangzhou Railway Station after snow caused a power
failure in Hunan Province, along the trunk route between Beijing and
Guangzhou.
The weather crisis could stop many holiday
travelers from going home for family reunions. Across China,
government officials have tried to persuade migrant workers to stay
where they are.
In Beijing, newspapers solicited ideas from the
public about how to help the migrants spend a happy holiday away
from home.
Guangzhou said it would open 157 parks for free,
from Sunday through February 12, to migrant workers who chose to
stay for the holiday.
-- Xinhua
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