China speeds repairs to snow-damaged schools for spring term

BEIJING—China has ordered provinces affected by this winter’s severe weather to expedite repairs to damaged schools to ensure the safety of students and teachers as the spring term kicks off. Repair work should be thoroughly detailed, including desks, equipment for science experiments, pipes, faucets and bounding walls, a circular jointly released on Monday by the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Education (MOE) said.
Last month, China allocated a special fund of 2.14 billion yuan (about 300 million U.S. dollars) to restore rural primary and middle schools. Disaster-stricken rural areas should have priority for the special fund, the circular said.
Money should be delivered to disaster-stricken counties in 20 working days and counties should designate specific schools for fund use within 15 workings days and supervise the repair work, said the circular.
Storms rendered 3.5 million square meters of school buildings unsafe.
The ministry was concerned about the structural safety of schools in snow-stricken areas, Jiang Peimin, director with the MOE, said last month. Snow forced more than 1,300 primary and middle schools in southern and central China to postpone the new semester, affecting more than 280,000 students, according to the MOE.
Severe snow disasters have left 1.65 million people snowblind and frostbitten, 500,000 livestock and wildlife dead and 3.1 million others on verge of starvation in Tibetan prefectures of northwestern Qinghai Province. Since October last year, consecutive low temperature had gripped the province. The temperature plunged to minus 36.3 degrees centigrade, the record lowest in January in the province, said the provincial meteorological bureau.
In Yushu, Guoluo and Huangnan Tibet Autonomous Prefectures, most of the grassland was covered by snow, usually 16 to 32 cm thick, which had brought great losses to local animal husbandry. In the disaster-stricken prefectures, 130,000 people had run out of fuels, 350,000 people in need of food and 110,000 others short of warm clothes or quilts, said the provincial government. Currently, the province’s task was to evacuate 11,000 people of 2,000 herdsmen households for the local conditions were not fit to live any longer.
Qinghai has allocated 16.85 million yuan for disaster relief but still in shortage of 134 million yuan. Winter storms have also plagued southern China since mid-January, leading to widespread traffic jams, structural collapses, blackouts and crop losses in 19 provinces, leaving 129 people dead and causing 151.65 billion yuan of losses, according to the Ministry of Civil Affairs.—Xinhua