Water grows scarce for thousands as drought hits
Print Edition
About 58,000 people in Hangzhou are feeling some of the worst effects of the summer’s prolonged drought and extreme heat in the form of scarcity of water for drinking, bathing and other uses, according to Hangzhou Forestry Bureau.
More than half them are in Yuhang District, and the rest are at Chun’an and Lin’an.
At Baizhang Town in Yuhang, 5,000-plus locals have been short on water for over a month since streams near the town dried up.
They have had to depend on a small fire truck that sends water into the town everyday, shallow wells and tap water from nearby towns via pipes.
The fire truck can only offer each household two barrels of water a day, the water from the shallow wells is neither abundant nor very clean, and water piped from nearby towns is good only for irrigating crops and is scarce as well.
“Over 5,000 people are suffering from drought ever since the 44 water intakes in the town dried up a month ago,” says Ma Guojun, director of the agriculture office in Baizhang Town.
In some places, the heat has been very extreme: A high of 43.5 degrees Celsius was recorded in Fenghua in east Zhejiang twice last week. High temperatures in 27 of the 36 cities and counties in the province surpassed 40 degrees Celsius for more than a week.
Fifteen people in Zhejiang Province had died by yesterday from heat-related illnesses.
Villagers in Yashan Village of Baizhang Town said it had not rained since the end of June and an artificial rain that officials produced by seeding clouds was too small to do much good.
Before the fire truck was put into water service, they had to carry water from villages kilometers away.
The fire truck, from the nearby Huanghu Fire Brigade, has only a small, 3.5-ton water capacity, but it is the largest such vehicle that can navigate the area’s hilly roads, officials said.
The truck also supplies two barrels a day per household in Dusong Village in the town, where “500 villagers haven’t had a shower for a whole month,” resident Wang Daoliang said.
Residents are asking to have more water piped in, and the local Yuhang Meteorological Bureau says it’s ready to seed clouds to produce rain when there are clouds in the sky.
Hangzhou has spent 80 million yuan (US$13 million) on its drought response, including trucking in water, irrigating farms and seeding clouds.
On Friday, Hangzhou began cutting back on power usage with an “orderly power utility” policy as a result of a daily 100-kilowatt power deficit.
The policy requires that all nighttime illumination of scenery must be shut off, manufacturing that does not require continuous operations is required to halt production for four days a week and high-energy-consumption enterprises must stay idle five days a week. Department stores, hotels and office buildings must reduce electricity consumption by 20 percent during the morning peak.
Hot and dry conditions led to a forest fire that broke out on the hills in Fuyang City in Hangzhou a week ago that took firefighters two days to put out. It rekindled on Thursday and wasn’t put out again until Sunday.
The withering weather also caused the price of fresh vegetables to rise 5.3 percent last week after increasing 2.7 percent last month, according to Hangzhou Statistics Bureau.
More than 77,000 hectares of farmland have been damaged in Hangzhou, causing 646 million yuan in losses, Xinhua news agency reported. Specialty crops in the area such as tea, lotus and hickory nuts have been hit very hard.
While high temperatures will persist most of the week, it should be a few degrees cooler, and then the temperature is forecast to drop some more toward the end of the week.
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