SHANGHAI - Heavy snow and rain closed airports, highways, and train lines across central and eastern China yesterday, stranding tens of thousands of travelers and threatening to block food supplies.
Snowfall since mid-January has been "the heaviest in a decade," affecting about 32.9 million people and causing an estimated $865 million in damage, the official Xinhua news agency said.
The snow has killed dozens of people, collapsed homes, caused power failures, and destroyed crops.
By disrupting food supplies, the weather could also fuel inflation, which hit an 11-year high of 4.8 percent last year, becoming a major economic and social problem for the government.
"Transportation of fresh farm products - including vegetables, fruit, livestock, and poultry - faces an extraordinarily grave situation," the State Council, China's Cabinet, said late Friday.
It ordered authorities to clear snow and ice from roads, exempt vehicles carrying farm produce from all traffic tolls, and ensure that gas stations gave "unlimited supplies" of petrol to those vehicles without raising prices.
Pricing, finance, commerce, and quality control authorities across China were instructed to exempt wholesale suppliers of fresh farm products from "as many charges as possible."
About 40,000 passengers, many of them traveling home for the Lunar New Year Festival in early February, were stranded at stations from Beijing to the southern city of Guangzhou yesterday, Xinhua reported.
A total of 136 electric passenger trains were stalled in central China's Hunan Province after snow damaged power lines. Diesel locomotives were being used to haul the electric trains out of the area as over 10,000 workers repaired the power lines.
At least five major airports, including those in Hunan's capital, Changsha, and one in Nanjing, capital of the eastern province of Jiangsu, were closed, state television said.
Highways around Nanjing were closed, as were 28 major roads in the southwestern province of Guizhou, where 27,000 travelers were stranded in bus stations, Xinhua reported.
In the eastern province of Anhui, 12,000 people were evacuated from dangerous locations because of the snow, it added.
The snowfall extended as far as China's commercial center of Shanghai, which saw its heaviest snow this decade yesterday, causing city authorities to promise to intervene in food markets to stabilize prices, the official Liberation Daily said.
