The heavy fog that shrouded parts of country at the weekend,
resulting in three deaths and countless delays, was expected
disperse with the arrival of a cold snap last night, the National
Meteorological Centre (NMC) said yesterday.
The fog first enveloped northeast China's Liaoning Province on Friday and then gradually
seeped across north China. Parts of central China and Shandong Province in the east were also
affected.
Visibility was less than 200 metres in parts of east China's
Shandong and Jiangsu provinces, north China's Beijing and
Tianjin municipalities and northeast China's
Liaoning Province, the NMC said.
The Beijing Municipal Observatory has issued a yellow fog
warning, the lowest in the yellow-orange-red scale and the first
such warning this winter.
As of noon yesterday, more than 100 scheduled flights at Beijing
Capital International Airport were delayed due to the heavy
fog.
In Liaoning Province, traffic-control authorities said that all
expressways in and out of the province had remained closed until
Sunday afternoon.
The heavy fog caused accidents along Beijing-Shenyang
expressway. Three people were killed and at least 20 seriously
injured in several traffic accidents in Liaoning Province at the
weekend.
The blinding fog complicated the rescue work, according to local
traffic police office.
Almost 600 long-distance bus trips were cancelled, affecting
nearly 30,000 travellers in Shenyang, capital of Liaoning Province,
yesterday.
In Beijing, sections of six different expressways were closed
after thick fog shrouded the capital beginning on Sunday night.
Rail travel was the only form of transportation to benefit from
the fog as travellers who were not able to move about by bus or
plane took to the rails, despite the crowds.
Wang Jin, a worker from the Shenyang Railway Station said
passenger numbers had increased by about 20 per cent at the
weekend.
Weather officials attributed the fog to strange weather and
environmental conditions.
"The unusually warm winter weather caused the high humidity in
the air. And there was hardly any wind. Both factors lead to the
dense fog," said Zhang Tao, deputy chief of the local observatory
in Shenyang.
Chen Jianhua, an associate professor at the Chinese Research
Academy of Environmental Sciences, said that Beijing was afflicted
by a haze rather than fog. Fog is mostly humidity, whereas haze can
include dust, smoke and other pollution. Increasing volumes of air
pollution caused by the start of the winter heating season had
exacerbated the foggy conditions, Chen said.
The local environment protection bureau in Beijing described the
air quality yesterday as medium-level polluted on its website. Chen
said the Pearl River Delta, Yangtze River Delta, the Basin of
Sichuan and North China are vulnerable to winter haze.
The haze has also caused a spike in health problems, with many
hospitals in Beijing yesterday reporting sharp increases in the
number of patients complaining about respiratory problems.
Yu Hongxia, a doctor of respiratory diseases at the China-Japan
Friendship Hospital in Chaoyang District, said she had noted a
sudden jump in the number of respiratory cases, climbing from a
daily average of about 150 to almost 200.
(China Daily November 21, 2006)