Emergency crews struggled on Saturday to restore power to parts of southern China blacked out for a week by heavy snow as forecasters warned of no quick end to the worst winter weather in 50 years.
Mobilising 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, the official Xinhua news agency reported.
The freak weather, which has killed at least 60 people and doomed millions to a cold, dark Lunar New Year holiday, could last another week, the Central Meteorological Station said on Saturday.
Repair teams were racing to bring power to Chenzhou, a city of four million in the southern province of Hunan, which has been without electricity for eight days. The town’s stocks of food and petrol are running low.
”We will strive to partially restore electricity supply in Chenzhou on Saturday,” Xinhua quoted Yin Jijun, an official with China’s national grid, as saying.
About 5 000 workers have been mending frozen power lines leading to Chenzhou, with some soldiers firing submachine guns to shatter ice cloaking the cables, according to Xinhua. It said two repair workers had been killed.
Fresh falls of snow started to blanket central, south and east China on Friday, prompting the government to warn that the weather crisis had yet to peak. ”The most difficult period is still not over yet. The situation remains grim,” the Cabinet said in a summary of an emergency meeting.
As much as 15cm of snow covered Shanghai, the financial capital, which posted a yellow snowstorm alert for the first time in 135 years. The city’s port at the mouth of the Yangtze River was closed in the early hours of Saturday, stranding more than 1 000 ships, Xinhua said.
Beijing was once again cold but clear.
Stability concerns
Premier Wen Jiabao, who was directing relief operations on Saturday from Hunan, told his Cabinet that officials had to ”ensure economic and social stability” in the face of the disaster, Xinhua reported.
There have been no reports of crowd trouble at thronged stations, but prices of food are rising sharply because of the weather chaos. With inflation already near an 11-year high, officials are worried about the potential for unrest.
About 8 000 freight trains have been delayed in the past week after toppled power lines and icy rails crippled the rail network, triggering the country’s most serious power crisis to date.
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 the railways creak back to life, coal shipments are being given priority, reducing crowded passenger trains to a crawl.
Train L44, bound from the southern metropolis of Guangzhou to Beijing, took 11 hours to reach Shaoguan, a distance of just more than 200km that should have taken at most two hours. Still, the 2 000 passengers on board were not complaining. Exhausted but relieved, they were among the lucky ones.
Millions of migrant workers for whom the Lunar New Year is usually the only time in the year they see their families will instead be stuck in the factory towns where they toil.
State television said 12-million migrants, almost half of the total in the Guangdong, will stay in the province over the holidays. Chinese New Year falls on February 7.
Cao Panpan, a 24-year-old trading-company employee, recounted how he had been swept along at Guangzhou station in a sea of people anxious to board their train. As many as 800 000 people besieged the station earlier in the week. ”For the rest of my life I will never forget February 1 2008 at Guangzhou train station,” he said.
Nearly six million passengers have been stranded on trains or in railway stations this week, officials estimate.
Roads are also still badly clogged, with an estimated 10 000 cars still snarled in snow and ice around Chenzhou. Huang Yan, a student, said a bus trip to her village in central Anhui province that usually takes one hour ended up taking eight hours. — Reuters