Posted on 06/16/2009 11:42:01 AM PDT by NYer
China correspondent Stephen McDonell and ABC cameraman Rob Hill saw day turn into night as a freak storm swept across the capital Beijing today.
"It was pitch black outside and you could see people looking out from the office towers across the road from us," McDonell said.
"In a couple of the photos you can see a clock in the distance showing it was around 11:30 am local time."
The storms were expected to affect western and northern Xinjiang, most part of Inner Mongolia, north-east China and north China.
Today's extreme weather follows yesterday's hail storms across eastern China's Anhui province, which killed 14 people and injured more than 180, AFP reports.
Anhui's Civil Affairs Bureau said that more than 10,000 people were evacuated and nearly 9,700 houses collapsed in yesterday's severe storm.
Anhui was struck by hail and winds of up to 104 kilometres per hour, causing $82 million worth of damage.
A similar hail storm struck the region in the first week of June, killing 23 people and injuring more than 200.
Officials have warned residents that more dangerous weather could follow.
(Excerpt) Read more at au.news.yahoo.com ...
It will raing mud in Korea tomorrow.
Nasty stuff, sticky and very hard to wash off of aircraft.
Sounds like what we have in the Kansas City area about every 72 hours this time of the year.
Proof of Global Warming?
Global warming but where does the ice come from?? SARC//
Wow, there’s weather in China too?
Amazing... such breathtaking reporting...
yes but it’s that special communist weather dontcha know? :)
Unbelievable picture!
Up here in Mpls-St Paul, we’ve had some mid-day thunderstorms that turned the sky so dark that street lights started turning on - but nothing quite like the picture you posted.
That’s midnight dark.....never remember a storm doing that in all my time in KS.
Plenty dark at times, but more like just after dusk to mid-stages of darkness, not completely black.
Weird.
Come on. I bet you have forgotten those Kansas winters when the snow was so deep we had to walk to school balancing on the telephone wires....and that was up hill — both ways.
I think they suffer from sandstorm influences from the Gobi.
were you barefoot and fighting off bears with a 3-ring binder?
I’m sure that’s part of it.
It’s also important to remember the Chinese invented weather before the West did.
You got it.
And, we had real homework. Mountains of it.
Like my boys used to say, “Back when Dad was youn, you know, when dinosaurs roamed the earth.”
Another Chinese weather control experiment gone awry.
Weird!
It is beyond anything I have ever experienced and I've been through noreasters and hurricanes. The closest I've ever seen anything like that was a total eclipse of the sun when street lights went on in the middle of the morning in Manhattan. Even then, it was not that dark.
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