By DPA
Beijing : Hundreds of thousands of snow-affected travellers were facing another night sleeping in streets, railway stations, vehicles and public buildings Thursday as the government tried to restore transport and power services.
Some 200,000 passengers were expected to board the 98 trains scheduled to leave Thursday from the southern transport hub of Guangzhou, where 800,000 people were reportedly stranded Wednesday.
But an estimated 2.5 million people had train tickets to leave from Guangzhou before China’s Spring Festival, or lunar New Year, which begins Feb 7, the Guangzhou Daily said.
Over 50,000 rail passengers departed Wednesday night, but it was uncertain if the entire backlog would be cleared before the festival begins.
Power cuts and collapsed transmission lines also forced the suspension of some rail services, partly because an earlier coal shortage was compounded by difficulties in transporting coal to and from snow-bound areas.
The shortage forced China’s national electricity grid to suspend about 7 percent of its capacity, Liu Zhenya, the general manager of the grid, said earlier this week.
President Hu Jintao Thursday visited coalmines in the northern provinces of Shanxi and Hebei, which were not hit by the heavy snow, to urge workers to step up production to meet the needs of power plants.
Hu also told the miners to pay attention to their safety underground, state television said.
Officials were also trying to persuade more travellers to return their tickets and spend the holiday in Guangdong.
“For the sake of their safety, and relieving the stress on transport, I advise migrant workers to stay in the cities where they work,” Zheng Guoguang, head of the China Meteorological Administration, told the official China Daily.
Weather forecasters have said the worst winter for 50 years in southern and central areas is likely to continue for several more days.
The provincial government in Guangdong, of which Guangzhou is the capital, said some 11.2 million migrant workers had agreed to remain in the province instead of returning home.
The newspaper said about 180,000 people were camping out near Guangzhou railway station and that fleets of buses ferried thousands more stranded passengers to several exhibition halls Wednesday afternoon.
The city’s Liuhua exhibition hall alone could accommodate 100,000 people, it said.
New passengers were still arriving but the total number of people waiting at the railway station had dropped Thursday, the newspaper said.
Reports said the severe weather had affected 105 million people in 17 provinces by Tuesday evening.
About 1.6 million people were evacuated to safer areas and 960,000 were still waiting for evacuation, after snow and ice caused 149,000 houses to collapse and damaged 602,000 others, China Daily said.
Another 470,000 road and rail passengers were stranded in four more central and southern provinces, the newspaper said.