When Beijing’s skies turned red
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A man stands by windows as a sandstorm hits Beijing. AFP |
Tonnes of sand rain down for hours, keeping people
indoors:
Ananth Krishnan
On Saturday, China’s capital turned into the Red Planet. Severe
sandstorms, the strongest this year, swept in from the country’s vast
northern deserts and laid siege to this city, covering it in swathes of
red dust and bringing life to a standstill.
Sandstorms are a regular part of life in Beijing. But in recent
years, they have become more intense as a result of spreading
desertification in China’s arid north and northwest, yet another
indicator of the country’s growing environmental crisis.
As much as one-third of the country is now covered in desert, and the
number of sandstorms has jumped six-fold in the last six decades to two
dozen a year, estimates the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Before the storms hit Beijing this weekend, they had, for two weeks,
ravaged much of the northwest, from western Xinjiang to Inner Mongolia.
On Saturday, it was the turn of Beijingers to wake up to an eerie,
orange-red sky. Thick, red mushroom clouds of dust rained down tonnes of
sand for hours, covering cars, sprinkling Tiananmen Square with yellow
dust and confining people to their homes.
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A Chinese woman covers her head with a scarf as she makes her
way along a street in Beijing. AFP |
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The sky turns a strange yellow colour as a sandstorm hits
Beijing on March 22, 2010. China warned residents across a huge
swathe of the country’s north including the capital Beijing to
avoid going outside on March 22 as a sandstorm blanketed the
area in fine yellow dust. AFP |
The Meteorological Bureau issued a warning to residents to stay
indoors with the air quality reaching “hazardous” levels, albeit a far
from unusual occurrence in one of the world’s most polluted cities.
Getting worse Resident
Liao Jianlin (53) said he could not recall storms of such scale when he
was growing up in this city. “The storms are getting worse now every
year, there was little sandy weather during the ‘80s or ‘90s,” he told
The Hindu.
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A Chinese policeman wears a face mask as he stands guard near
Tiananmen Square during a sandstorm in Beijing. AFP |
“The most serious period was the early 2000s, when this would happen
more than 10 times a year.”
He said the Government needed to pay more attention “to the health of
the environment.” “The Government should put in more regulations to stop
the factories that continue to illegally pollute,” Jianlin said.
Guo Hu, head of the Beijing Meteorological Station, said the
situation had begun to improve following afforestation drives in recent
years. The city had only one sandstorm last year, he told State-run
Xinhua news agency.
The storms were still far worse in the country’s northern areas, said
Wu Guang, a native of Zhangjiakou in Hebei province, which borders Inner
Mongolia and faces the full impact of the Gobi desert’s winds.
“Back home, the storms are much stronger,” Wu, who moved to Beijing
five years ago said.
- The Hindu |
