Power cuts blamed on ice and unusually heavy snowfall yesterday left about 100,000 people waiting for trains in the key southern Chinese rail hub of Guangzhou, state media reported.
Air travel has also been affected, with numerous flights delayed out of Shanghai, where light snow was falling.
The bad weather comes at the worst possible time for travelers and transport authorities, as the country moves into the peak Lunar New Year travel season with tens of millions of Chinese on the move by train, plane and bus.
CUTS
Most of the delays were blamed on cuts that left 136 electric passenger trains stranded on the tracks in Hunan Province, which lies at the midpoint of the main Beijing-Guangzhou railway, the official Xinhua news agency said.
The logjams, which also struck as far away as Kunming in the country's southwest, have been compounded by a slowdown in bus travel because of the closure of icebound highways.
MIGRANTS
Most of those stuck in Guangzhou were migrants working in the region's export industries who were returning to their homes elsewhere for the holiday, the main time for Chinese family gatherings. The holiday this year falls on Feb. 7.
Hunan and other parts of central China have been hit in recent days by freakishly cold weather, icy rain and snow that has accumulated on power lines, causing them to snap in places.
Some areas have seen the heaviest snowfalls in more than a decade, with more bad weather forecast for the coming days.
The railway authority had sent almost 10,000kg of rice, vegetables, meat and edible oil, along with 20,000 boxes of instant noodles and drinking water to relieve those stuck aboard trains, Xinhua said. About 100 diesel locomotives were being dispatched to move the trains along, the report said.
The harsh weather has aggravated the customary winter power cuts by blocking coal deliveries, while the government last week issued a wide-reaching order to speed up food shipments to markets in hopes of reining in persistent inflation.
Under the measure, food trucks will be exempt from paying road tolls.
Double-digit percentage increases in food prices for much of the past year have driven China's overall inflation rate to among its highest levels in a decade.
Last month, consumer prices were 6.5 percent higher than in the year earlier.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS