During a road trip to Beijing, China Car Times encountered extremely dense fog that gave a maximum viewing range of 4m. The police sealed the road up for 16 hours - thats right, 16 hours in a car, overnight, in November, on a Chinese highway. Did we mention it was very cold? It was extremely cold. We feel very sorry for the Chinese truckers (above)that have been sitting in blizzard conditions on the highway since Saturday! We thought the Police would have eased the truckers off the highway one at a time, but that sounds like hard work, why not just seal off the road?
A large number of trucks have been stranded on a 200-kilometer section of the Lianhuo Highway in Luoyang, Henan Province, since Saturday as heavy snow cut off all highways in neighboring Shanxi Province. (picture above, click for above.)
Its not just central Chinese provinces, its the usually warm south too:
Guizhou Province, in the southwest, has shut nine expressways since heavy snow began to sweep across the mostly mountainous region on January 12, stranding about 10,000 passengers. Along the highway linking the provincial capital of Guiyang to Tongren, frozen ice topped seven centimeters, stranding about 500 vehicles, some for seven days.
Even Tibetans, who must be used to bad weather, had to be rescued
In the Tibet Autonomous Region, a highway leading to the northwestern Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region reopened late last night after being closed for 80 hours. Local government and armed police rescued 85 people stranded in 25 snowbound vehicles.
We wonder why the police were armed? Were they ready to attack the splitist snow, or perhaps the capitalist ice? Either way, that snow storm must have been bad ass if the police had to be called to rescue the local inhabitants.
January sees the worlds largest migration of people happening in China, most inner city immigrants will be leaving the city and going back to their towns and villages, but with chronic bad weather affecting the roads, and most train tickets already sold out, how will they get home?
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