Special Report: China's war on snow havoc

    BEIJING, Feb. 3 (Xinhua)-- A stampede in Guangzhou Railway Station of south China's Guangdong province has left one passenger dead as stranded passengers rushed to board trains after days of waiting.

    The Guangzhou police authority confirmed the death of Li Hongxia, a Guangzhou watch factory worker from Hubei province, despite emergency treatment on the early morning of Saturday.

    Qi Xiaolin, deputy head of the Public Security Bureau of Guangzhou told a press conference late Saturday night that this is the first such case in Guangdong province during the current Spring Festival transport period.

    Li arrived at the station at 3 p.m. Friday, when the square and surrounding area was crowded with 260,000 passengers waiting to board trains, Qi told reporters.

    At 9 p.m., Li was jostled to the ground as crowds of people were forcing their way into the square and got injured in the following stampede. In serious coma, she was sent to hospital immediately.

    This is the second reported death that happened in an overcrowded railway station. On Jan. 13, Leng Jing, a student from the Anhui Normal University, was killed after being shoved off an overcrowded platform in a railway station in Wuhu, Anhui province.

    The head of the station, a deputy head and platform worker were sacked after the accident.

    Persisting snow since mid-January, the worst in 50 years in central, eastern and southern China, has cut off the journey of tens of millions of people who were eager to return home for Spring Festival, a traditional festival for family reunion.

    So far, nearly 1 million people holding train tickets are still stranded in Guangzhou, said Wang Yongping, spokesman of the Railway Ministry on Sunday.

    Every day 12,000 police along with numerous security guards are posted in the Guangzhou station to maintain order.

    Railways all over the country delivered a total of 4.06 million passengers on Saturday, 189,000 people more from the same day last year. Guangzhou alone saw 190 trains depart on Saturday, delivering 430,000 passengers, Wang said.

    The iced-over southern section of China's north-south artery road, the Beijing-Zhuhai Expressway, has partly opened for traffic with vehicles moving very slowly, but most of the section are still sealed off as freezing rain continued falling, according to latest information from the Ministry of Communications

    By 10 a.m. on Sunday, most of the expressways in east China's Zhejiang Province had been closed as the road surface was too icy, and some expressways in Anhui, Hubei and Jiangxi provinces were closed due to heavy fog, the ministry said.

    Cold weather also froze a few expressway sections in Guizhou, Fujian, Guangdong, Jiangsu, Yunnan and Shanghai, but expressways in the country's other places all remained running normally, the ministry said.

    Eleven state highways in six provinces were also partly sealed off after icing over, it said.