Beijing, January 05: Heavy snow has brought more travel chaos to north China, stranding thousands of truckers for two days on a Beijing highway and 1,400 rail passengers in Inner Mongolia, state media said Tuesday.
The snow that blanketed the region at the weekend has ended in Beijing but the national weather centre said the mercury dipped Tuesday to -15.6 degrees Celsius (four Fahrenheit) — the coldest temperature in more than two decades.
The freezing weather was expected to continue until Thursday for the Chinese capital, nearby Tianjin and Inner Mongolia, with temperatures forecast to fall as low as minus 32 degrees Celsius, it said on its website.
On the outskirts of Beijing, truck drivers were forced to sleep in their vehicles for two nights on a highway when snow made the road impassible, causing a 20-kilometre (12-mile) back-up, the Beijing News reported.
The newspaper, citing transit police, said the highway would only be cleared on Tuesday — after two chilly nights for the drivers, some of whom said they were afraid to sleep for fear of dying of exposure.
Others said they were prepared for the traffic mess.
“We brought food as we expected the jam,” said one trucker, who had two cases of instant noodle and one thermos of water on board.
The heavy snow and freezing temperatures have led to hundreds of flight cancellations and delays in Beijing, shuttered schools on Monday and snarled traffic throughout the capital.
In Inner Mongolia, a train hit a wall of snow more than two metres (6.5 feet) high on Sunday, leaving 1,400 travellers in the dark and without heating overnight before they could be evacuated, the China Daily reported Tuesday.
“Though snow stopped yesterday, the temperature was -28 Celsius, freezing the doors,” the paper quoted Zhang Jianwen, a police officer involved in the rescue effort, as saying.
Nearly 2,000 people including police and local farmers were mobilised to dig out the train, which was heading from the city of Harbin in Heilongjiang province to Baotou in Inner Mongolia, the report said.
Central China was now under a snow storm warning until Wednesday, stretching from Henan to Hunan provinces, the national weather bureau said on its website.
—Agencies