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ALTAY
(XINJIANG) (Xinhuanet) -- Two herdsmen have been reported
dead and more than 60 injured as a result of the continuing
blizzards, which has hit northwest Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous
Region since last October.
Local
civil affairs department sources said, there are 50,000
herdsmen still stranded deep in the sea of snow in Qinghe,
Fuyun and Jeminay counties, which suffered the heaviest
snowstorms.
They
said that 63,000 herdsmen are short of food and over 5,000
households need fuel in the disaster-affected areas.
The
blizzards also caused the death of 4,240 head of livestock,
and another 2.15 million are under threat by the extreme
cold.
Sources
said that the snowfall is the heaviest in the Altay area
in the past 50 years.
The
lowest temperature in the disaster-torn areas was a reported
45 degrees minus Celsius, and the depth of the snow has
reached 70 centimeters in plain areas and 2.5 meters in
mountainous areas, according to local meteorological sources.
The
Altay area, covering 117,000 square kilometers, is an important
animal husbandry production base in Xinjiang. The biggest
number of livestock in the area was over 4.8 million last
year.
The
current blizzards resulted in the starvation and freezing
of those animals, a major source of revenue for Altay pasture
area.
Groups
of sheep have been seen digging in the snow trying to find
dry grass. Most of the time, they failed, because serious
drought and locusts last year have left almost nothing on
the ground.
In some
areas, people usually find their clothes bitten into by
goats when they walk near the animals. "There is too
little fodder, and the goats are extremely hungry,"
said a local herdsman. The fodder he has stored has almost
been eaten up by his 400 goats.
The
Altay area has been hit by continuous snowfall, including
22 heavy ones, in the past 100 plus days since the first
snowstorm hit the area on October 18 last year.
Mizan,
director of the Animal Husbandry Administration of Altay
area, said that they stored 940 million kilograms of grass
and 96. 36 million kilograms of fodder before the coming
of winter. The storage can help the area's livestock through
the winter and spring in normal years, the officials said.
However,
the stored food will last only to the end of February because
of the heavy snow.
Xinhua
learned that in spite of the great disaster relief efforts,
the area still needs more than 23,300 tons of grass and
18,000 more tons of fodder to feed all its livestock.
Meteorological
sources predicted that heavy snow is also expected in the
area in the early spring.
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