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 10:00 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 four 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 Jan. 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 6:00 p.m. Saturday and 6:00 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 Feb. 12, to migrant workers who chose to stay for the
holiday.
(Xinhua News Agency February 3, 2008)
