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Winter chaos in China spreads holiday misery
2008-02-03
China's fiercest winter in half a century brought renewed misery for millions of travelers on Sunday as they struggled to make their way home for the year's most important holiday. Traffic on major highways slowed to a crawl as people took to the roads, despairing of lengthy rail delays which cost one traveler their life when frustrated passengers stampeded to board trains. Icy conditions made travel treacherous, one traffic jam stretched 70 km (43 miles) and the army deployed tanks to clear roads of ice. "On the road, we had to move forward step by step, stopping every 100 or 200 meters," said Feng Quanfu, after he arrived in the southern metropolis of Guangzhou 11 days after setting off from the north on what should have been a two-day journey. "Yesterday, the whole day, we moved only one kilometer," he told China News. Earlier in the day, officials warned people to stay away from railway stations after a migrant worker was crushed to death on Friday at Guangzhou as 260,000 people besieged the station. Rail services were recovering slowly, hampered by some trains being commandeered to deliver emergency supplies. Experts forecast the freak winter could continue past Chinese New Year, which will be celebrated mid-week, and said the cold and snow in areas unaccustomed to such weather was the country's worst natural disaster in decades. Millions in the south ended their ninth day without power. "Severe disasters will continue," the government said. "Relief work will remain very grim." Officials believe at least 60 people have been killed during the bad weather, most of them in road accidents. CALLING IN THE ARMY Mobilizing the might of the state, China has deployed more than 300,000 troops and nearly 1.1 million militia and army reservists to get traffic moving and ensure power supplies. Marksmen fired sub-machine guns at power lines to blast off ice and soldiers used tanks to clear the build-up of snow, Xinhua reported, saying such war-like tactics were widespread as troops "combated snow disasters." In Chenzhou, a city of 4 million in the southern province of Hunan, which has been without electricity for nine days, shopkeepers huddled under blankets while cooks warmed their hands over woks. Petrol stations there are running low on fuel. "We can't go on like this for much longer," said Hu Jian, selling cigarettes by candlelight. Authorities in Guangzhou said their priority was to clear the backlog of thousands of people still waiting at the railway station, having cajoled millions more migrant workers to stay put and skip what for many is their only chance each year to visit family. Man Xifeng, a 21-year-old factory worker, counted himself lucky to make it inside the concourse after two days. "It is very sad and scary because there are so many people waiting to go home," he said. The blizzards have created China's worst-ever power crisis after toppled power lines and icy rails crippled the rail network, holding up thousands of coal trains. Miners are now working overtime and, as the railways creak back to life, coal shipments are being given priority, reducing crowded passenger trains to a crawl. The government has put the immediate economic losses of the weather chaos at $7.5 billion. It says that 223,000 houses have been toppled by snow or ice and 862,000 damaged. As much as 21 cm (7 inches) of snow covered Shanghai, the financial capital, closing its bustling port on Saturday and stranding more than a thousand ships. Beijing was cold but clear. Warmer, sunnier weather was helping the area around Shanghai get back on its feet on Sunday but elsewhere in the country woes seemed to multiply. In the southwestern province of Guizhou, swept by power outages over the past week, authorities said television and radio might have to go off air. (Additional reporting by Royston Chan in Guangzhou; writing by Simon Rabinovitch; editing by Matthew Jones)
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