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Ice, snow disrupt ground and air traffic

By Wang Yan in Beijing and Liu Ce in Shenyang (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-02-26 09:28
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Ice, snow disrupt ground and air traffic

Maintenance workers use snow plows to clear a highway in northeastern Heilongjiang province on Wednesday. [China Daily]


When Dou Shenghua stepped out of his apartment in Shenyang, capital of Liaoning province at 7 am yesterday, he found his car covered in ice.

"I failed to open the door no matter how hard I tried," said the 38-year-old manager.

"I poured water over the car and knocked on the ice with a small wooden board. It took me 20 minutes just to get the door open. Then there was the ice covering both the front and back windows, so I started up the car to heat up the glass," he said.

Dou was one and a half hours late for work.

He was just one of the many residents in most parts of the province who had their lives disrupted by temperature drops following rain and snow that started on Wednesday.

Icicles in the area also weighed down power lines and cut electricity to several high-speed trains.

The cold front delayed more than 10 high-speed trains along the major Shenyang-Beijing line yesterday and caused the shutdown of highways and airports.

"All of the delayed trains had to run pass the Shenyang-Beijing line, which was severely affected by the freezing weather," an officer at the Beijing railway station told Beijing Evening News yesterday.

Workers cleared the ice and additional trains were sent to tow affected ones, the Shenyang Railway Bureau said.

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On Wednesday, the Liaoning provincial meteorological department put out a red alert - the highest level - for road freezes, warning that the frost was a rare situation in the province in the past two decades.

Seventeen highways in the province were also closed due to slippery conditions.

Workers spread de-icing salt and ice-melting agents on the highways to reopen the roads as soon as possible, said the Liaoning highway administration bureau yesterday.

The highway closures also disrupted travel to airports.

"I took a passenger to Xiantao Airport at 7:00 am. The highway was closed so I had to detour. It was a tough trip because the roads were really slippery and the ones to the airport were jammed," said Wang Siquan, a taxi driver in Shenyang.

Wang said he also drove past five or six overturned cars along the way.

Similarly, slippery runways at the Xiantao International Airport disrupted 15 flights yesterday morning, Xinhua News Agency reported.

"The airport was closed at midnight to clear the runway. Things got back to normal as it reopened at 9 am yesterday," Dou Zhipeng, an officer at the airport, told China Daily yesterday.

Liu Bowen, a local traffic police officer, said there was no rise in the number of accidents in Shenyang.

"Local drivers and pedestrians can be pretty experienced at dealing with the cold weather," Liu said.