Thick fog continued to blanket parts of western and central
China Sunday, causing traffic accidents, flight delays and highway
closures.
Plunging visibility from the bad weather delayed more than 150
flights and left 12,000 passengers stranded Sunday in the Shuangliu
International Airport in the capital of Sichuan Province, airport
officials said.
The airport was closed for nearly nine hours Sunday morning
before a flight to Tibet took place at 11:10 AM.
"Full operations did not return to normal until more than an
hour later when the first flight from Shenzhen in Guangdong
Province landed here," airport publicity department official Liu
Gang told China Daily.
"It was the second day visibility in the airport had been at
about 10 meters."
On Saturday morning, a heavy fog fell on Chengdu, shrouding its
downtown areas and six suburban counties with a visibility of under
50 meters.
The airport itself was closed for eight hours that day, with 121
flights delayed and 11,000 passengers stranded.
Sichuan weather bureau deputy chief Zhong Xiaoping said
environmental pollution was a major cause of the fog.
Zhong advised citizens to take buses more often, save energy,
cut car exhaust, and play a part in the recycling of waste
materials.
More than 10,000 vehicles were stranded from the fog on highways
Sunday, about 4,000 more than the day before, the Chengdu
Transportation Bureau said. It advised residents to take trains in
the next few days.
He Ping, a 49-year-old company employee, drove from Deyang in
northern Sichuan to Chengdu through the Chengdu-Mianyang Expressway
Sunday afternoon.
"I've driven for nearly 20 years and have never seen such heavy
fog before. I could not even see the line separating the fast lane
from the slow one," He told China Daily.
Meanwhile, heavy fog also persisted in Hebei, Henan and Shaanxi
provinces for consecutive days. The poor visibility forced highways
to close and delayed flights Sunday.
The Xi'an-Baoji Expressway in Shaanxi Province was closed on
Saturday as visibility in some sections was less than 2 meters.
Meteorologists also attributed the fog to a combination of high
humidity, lower temperatures and low wind speeds in the affected
regions.
(Xinhua News Agency December 24, 2007)
