On the evening of Jan 28, 2008, I was on bullet train D109 from Shanghai to Changsha. It was absolutely not a normal train ride: the entire south China was trembling in chilly weather. In several provinces, abnormal abundant snowfall had cut off many expressways, railroads and even highways connecting adjacent cities, blocking tens of millions of people going home for Spring Festival. On my leaving from Shanghai South Railway Station, I took a glance at the huge electronic notice board showing the arrival time of trains heading for this city. Really sad: every one of them was expected to be delayed, as for the exact arriving time, "Not Determined Yet" it said.
The D109 went on all right for the first few hours. Outside of the window by my seat it was immense blackness. According to the indicator hanging in our carriage, temperature inside is 24 Celsius centigrade, while the number was -1 outside. For Southerners, the minus sign before a temperature was rare. As I was wondering how long our train would be late for, a shudder shook me fiercely. It could be felt that the train had halted itself. Seconds later, there came a male's voice from the loudspeaker, "Passengers, now we are in temporary stopping. Attendants please be at your positions. The power supply in carriages may be cut off for a while."
Strange enough, why did the stopping have something to do with power? A passing attendant explained that power lines providing electricity for the train had problems, "It's frozen. Inches-thick ice clings to the power line, which prevents the train from getting power as usual."
To our delight, our carriage did not fall into complete darkness as we feared. A few lights went off and a few remained. About one hour later the train moved again, but at a much lower speed. This bullet train was proudly designed to achieve an average speed of 200 km/h, costing only 7 hours from Shanghai to Changsha. But with the current speed it seemed unlikely. Informed passengers nearby said our train had just been cut into two independent sections (an exclusive convenience for bullets), running on their owns to ease the power shortage. Suddenly, deafening cracking and striking sounds propagated from the ceiling of our carriage. "See? Ice clinging to the power line. It was scratched off the line by the pantograph, and falls onto the top of the train." A passenger laughed. He proceeded to point outside of the window, "Sparks caused by the scratch. It brightens the ground nearby the railway." I wondered what a scene it would be looking at the rumbling train from afar. A giant steel dragon with lightening on head?
Predictably, our train arrived at Changsha with a not-so-short delay, 5 hours to be exact. Walking out of Changsha Railway Station, I was startled to see a plaza covered in ice, snow and water. Autos parking on the plaza were all decorated with icicles, some of which were a foot long. Never in mind had I thought it would be like this! My father, in a thick coat standing in crowds at the exit, was waiting for my arrival for more than 5 hours. Yes, by the time it was 4 in the morning!
"You are lucky," my father said with a smile, puffing white vapor into the air. "The expressway is currently available. But weather forecast said there would be blizzards tomorrow, making the expressway impossible to use. Be careful, the ground is extremely slippery."I nodded and followed him into a microbus, in front of which sat two men. "This microbus was my friend's. My friend said he had never been driving under such conditions, so he called his elder brother, an experienced driver, to accompany."
The microbus crept out of the plaza. Our destination was my home, Yiyang, a small sized city located 70 kilometers northwest to Changsha. Usually it took no more than an hour to drive there, however, the extreme weather made it an unknown. The Changsha city was saturated in pure white, at least every bit of the road was. The expressway connecting the two cities was barely usable. On our vehicle the two drivers took turns to master the steering wheel. Whoever was driving, he bent so much forward to gaze at the road surface, as if there were dangerous traps ahead. In the midway of our journey it started to pour ice rain. We found that simply turning on the windscreen wiper was not a solution at all, for the water streaming on the windscreen would quickly freeze before it was wiped off. Embarrassingly, the driver had to park the vehicle at a safe place, get off with an iron object, and knock the ice off manually. Two hours later we reached Yiyang, seeing empty streets covered in knee-deep snow. I asked myself, "Are we now in North pole? Is this where I lived for 15 years?"
It turned out that my father was right when saying I was lucky on the plaza of Changsha Railway station. A friend of mine, Yu Jiwen, who took the train K137 from Shanghai to Changsha, left Shanghai South Railway Station almost at the same time as I did. Guess how long he spent on the train? 37 hours, more than 20 hours of delay. To be even worse, the next day's trains from Shanghai to Changsha were all suspended, without day. Airports in Shanghai and Changsha both shut off, all flights cancelled, without day. CCTV news reported that there were 100 thousand passengers held up in Shanghai South Railway Station, among whom at least one was my university mate Wen Sheng, who slept on the floor in the Station for two nights, before he caught a train to go home.
On Jan 29, one day after I got home, blizzards did come as forecasted. After more than 15 days of snowfall, ice rain and below zero temperature, the entire Hunan province was wrestling with a monster that no one knew when it would surrender. In my home, tap water was dried, for the frozen water had broken the pipeline and water meter. Everyday my family carried water in buckets for cooking and cleaning from an old fashioned sway well, about 50 meters away from our building. I had never felt so necessary to use water sparingly.
Compared with residents living in southern Hunan's Chenzhou city, we were a lot more fortunate. The constant snowfall had pressed down a great number of power iron towers nationwide, Chenzhou was the greatest victim of all. Just a few days before Spring Festival, Chenzhou was completely cut off from the provincial power grid, making it a helpless, isolated city. Candles were sold out, all hotels with self-sustained power generators were booked, yet this could not stop the city from falling into desperate darkness and coldness at night. Even cell phones could not function, for there was no power for base stations. As for Guizhou, the situation was even worse, the whole province was almost out of power. Humans felt for the first time that electricity was almost as important as oxygen.
On a large scale, the bad weather did not directly cause as much casualties as earthquakes, floods and typhoons did, however, everybody was talking it using the word "disastrous". One reason was that it happened right before China's Spring Festival, a season with busiest railways, expressways and airports. More than 100 million people were estimated to move during this period. And it was at this critical moment that countless traffic paths went down, holding up swarms of people at railway stations, airports and even on expressways. Take Guangzhou Railway station for example, as a result of suspended trains, there were as many as 500 thousand people, most of them migrant workers, concentrating in that area. "It's like a ticking bomb, which could explode any time soon." An Officer at Guangzhou Railway station said to a reporter. "Our work's priority is to maintain order, making sure there would be no turbulence. Besides, the government is persuading people to stay in Guangzhou for the Spring Festival to ease transportation tensions." On the Beijing-Zhuhai expressway, Chenzhou section, for tens of kilometers, vehicles were stuck because of iced roads. Long-haul truckers and passengers were as depressed as you can imagine. Though heavy machinery was used to clear the road, the effect seemed to be limited compared with nature's mighty power. As long as snowfall continued, it was almost impossible to make a way out.
"I almost burst into tears when I was on helicopter, looking down at the land of Hunan from the sky." A correspondent of Hunan TV told the audience. "In my impression Hunan is a land covered in green. But what I saw was merely pale white." True. The bad weather's impact on the province was so tremendous that it drew great anxiety from the central government. Within 48 hours, China's Premier Wen Jiabao came to Changsha for 2 times, a sign of great concerning. Situation was no better elsewhere. President Hu Jiantao and other Politburo Standing Committee members also inspected other areas affected by bad weather. A highlight of Hu’s emphasis was the north should produce as much coal as possible to fed power plants in the South, suggesting a severe energy crisis might come.
Calamity in the south might be laughable to people living in the North. In their eyes nothing appeared more natural than snow and ice in winter, while in the south it turns into a disaster. “In 1954 we had even greater snow weather here in Yiyang.” One of my relatives, in his 60s, recalled. “I would say it was colder than today. In 1954 the Zi River froze completely. People with a burden can walk across it. Now at least the river is flowing” So why didn’t we ever hear the term “the 1954 snow disaster” or something like that? “Because people were not so modern those days.” the old man explained, “No use of electricity, only oil lights, no use of tap water, only wells, pools and rivers. What’s most important, back then we had no expressways, no airports, and no migrant workers being thousands of kilometers away from home. So we didn’t feel much inconvenience.”
The old man maybe was right. The reason why we were so vulnerable to natural attacks was largely due to our incomplete modernization. Last year we transformed many of our countries’ trains to be electricity-driven, yet we neglected the fragility of power lines; tap water had taken the place of almost all wells in cities, leaving no other water sources even in emergency. Iron towers we erected for communication looked stout; actually they could not stand even a little ice’s weight. The huge number of migrant workers, on one hand brought significant GDP to our country, while on the other hand, poses great challenge to our transportation capabilities, especially under extreme conditions. In the process of modernization, we forgot about one very important thing: how to cope with Mother Nature effectively, in cases she became outrageous from time to time.
Twenties days of bad weather exhausted the entirely south. The sky eventually became clear on the eve of Spring Festival. Routinely, we declared victory over the bad weather, but learning a lesson from this event is far from over.
