Chinese cities turn air-raid shelters into heat shelters

Beijing: Many cities in China have been opening air-raid shelters for local residents to escape heat waves in some areas which have seen temperatures soaring past 40 C, leading to chickens and pigs in farms perishing from the heat.

Temperatures inside some shelters are about 10 C lower than outside, making them attractive places for students to study or play chess and some residents to play ping-pong or read free books, media reports said.

Two shelters in Central China’s Wuhan, Hubei Province, will operate for 12 hours each day until September. Six air raid shelters, able to accommodate up to 2,000 people, in Hangzhou, the capital city of East China’s Zhejiang Province, have been equipped with free wifi, drinks and heatstroke medicines to the residents. Hangzhou has also designated specific areas within seven subway lines as rest areas where chairs are provided for passengers to cool off, ThePaper.cn reported.

Besides Wuhan and Hangzhou, air raid shelters used as public cooling centers can also seen in Xi’an, Northwest China’s Shaanxi Province, and Nanjing, capital city of Jiangsu Province.

Large parts of China have been experiencing unusual heat this year. As of Tuesday, the National Meteorological Center has issued 43 high temperature warnings this year, including 27 yellow warnings and 16 orange warnings. The national average precipitation is 233.4 millimeters, 11.2 percent less than the same period in 2022, the People’s Daily reported Gao Hui, a chief forecaster at the National Climate Center, as saying.

Several animal tragedies have been attributed to the scorching heat. A late-night power outage in Harbin, Northeast China’s Heilongjiang Province, led to the death of 462 pigs at a hog farm due to sustained elevated temperatures. Previously, a chicken farm in Suizhou, Central China’s Hubei Province, failed to issue an alarm in time due to a faulty alarm line linked to a fan, causing more than 4,000 chickens to perish from the heat.

Persistent heat waves have led to a surge in electricity demand and resulted in a major power plant setting a new record for electricity production. The integrated load of the entire network of the China Southern Power Grid, which provides power to five provinces, reached 227 million kilowatts on Tuesday, setting a record high, according to cinic.org.cn.

El Nino comes with an increase in sea temperatures in the tropical Pacific, resulting in changes in atmospheric circulation patterns, which in turn affect climate and weather patterns worldwide, Sun Shao, a senior researcher at the National Climate Center affiliated with the China Meteorological Administration, told the Global Times on Thursday. About 90 percent of the impacts of El Nino from July to September will likely prevail until the end of 2023, according to the World Meteorological Organization citing model predictions and expert assessments.