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Continued foggy spell throws life out of gear in Capital
Staff Reporter | New Delhi
Life continued to be fogged out in the national Capital for the third consecutive day on Friday. Senior officials at the Met department have said that weather condition during weekend is not going to be any better.
“There will be dense fog in the morning on Saturday and Sunday. During daytime, the sky will be clear and the maximum and minimum temperatures will continue to hover around 20 degrees and 10 degree Celsius respectively,” said an official.
Normal life has been crippled for the past few days due to dense fog with most of the flights from the Indira Gandhi International Airport being either rescheduled or cancelled. Train services have been no better and road traffic in the national Capital continues to crawl for most part of the day. The weatherman has predicted very low visibility, drizzle and cold wave on Republic Day.
Dense fog also affected normal life in Punjab, Haryana and Chandigarh. Night temperature slipped to 3.6 degrees Celsius, 4.4 degrees Celsius below normal in Jammu, against 4.6 degrees Celsius on Thursday. Minimum temperature dipped by 5 degrees below normal in parts of Punjab, Haryana and Chandigarh. Amritsar was the coldest place with minus 1.2 degree Celsius.
The Runway Visual Range (RVR) at IGIA on Friday plunged below 50 m forcing complete shutdown of operations for over two hours. More than 10 flights were cancelled. “The dense fog started to descend on the airport at 11.30 pm on Thursday, and visibility dropped below 50 m at 2.30 am on Friday. The low visibility procedures were implemented at 1.38 am which continued till 1 pm on Friday. The RVR continued to escalate at runways from 50 m to 150 m in this period and plunged below 50 m for two times forcing a complete shutdown for over one-and-half hours. Both the runways were put on low visibility procedures till 11.22 am,” said an airport official. He said that 28 domestic and international flights were rescheduled and over 100 were delayed due to low visibility and backlog. In view of the fog, Emirates has rescheduled all its flights to Dubai from Delhi till January 25.
Several passengers were stranded at the airport and all the waiting rooms were packed to capacity. “The display is showing that the flight is on time but we have been waiting here for an hour. When I called on their helpline the person on the other side said that the flight is running late by half-an-hour,” said Surendra Kumar who was waiting for his boss R Prashant Chabra. Another passenger Rahul Dikshit arrived over three hours late from Pune. His flight 3153 of Kingfisher Airlines landed at around 4.30 pm but its scheduled time was 1pm.
At least 50 trains were cancelled by the Northern Railways, 111 trains were reported running late and about 40 trains had to be rescheduled due to poor visibility.
The Met department predicted a dense fog in the intervening night of Friday and Saturday. According to the forecast, the dense fog will start at 11.30 pm on Friday which will continue till 10.30 am on Saturday. The maximum temperature on Friday was 18.7 degree Celsius which was two notches above and minimum was 7.4 degree Celsius which was one notch below the normal. The Met-department has predicted more relief on Saturday when maximum temperature will hover at 21 and minimum will not go below 9 degree Celsius.
Meanwhile, the commuters were stranded on roads of Delhi as traffic was hit. “I started early morning to reach my office at ITO but got one hour late,” said Shivani Yadava resident of Patparganj. The DND flyovers, Gurgaon toll bridge, ring road, Maharani Bagh were some of the roads where traffic stalled in the early hours on Friday.
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