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Festive week: Dense fog in Capital, traffic choked on hill roads
Dense fog and high pollution levels in Delhi caused flight diversions, while traffic snarls occurred in hill states due to an influx of tourists.
The festive cheer that comes with the week between Christmas and New Year once again brought with it two familiar sights to Delhi and the picturesque hill states that surround it — a dense fog enshrouded the Capital, reducing visibility and impairing flight operations even as pollution levels remained uncomfortably high; and hundreds of thousands of tourists thronged towns in Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh, causing serpentine traffic snarls on streets, highways and tunnels.
In Delhi, the season’s first dense fog brought visibility at the Indira Gandhi International Airport (IGIA) to zero metres between 5.30 am and 9.30 am, forcing officials to divert seven flights to Jaipur and one to Ahmedabad. As the smog smudged silhouettes across the city, the air quality index (AQI) was in the “very poor” range, breaking the three-day “severe” but staying well over safe limits. The minimum temperature was 7.8°C, largely unchanged from the previous day, but the maximum rose to 25.9°C, five above normal for this time of the year.
The India Meteorological Department (IMD) classifies a fog as shallow when the visibility is between 500m and 1,000m, as moderate fog when it is between 200m and 500m, and as dense when the visibility plunges below 200 metres. The agency predicted that another “dense to very dense” fog will wrap Delhi and large swathes of northwestern India on Tuesday and Wednesday mornings, with temperatures unlikely to dip in this time.
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However, an oncoming spell of rain is likely to bring the region showers on New Year’s Eve and New Years’ Day, said IMD.
A moderate fog also draped neighbouring Noida, Ghaziabad and Gurugram, though less severe than Delhi, resulting in traffic snarls at the Capital’s borders with its neighbouring towns early in the morning.
“There will be dense to moderate fog in the early hours of the next two days. However, the skies will continue to be clear during the day, as a result of which the maximum will not fall for the next few days. The minimum should remain around seven degrees throughout the week,” said Kuldeep Srivastava, an IMD official.
Then, outside the Capital, north India’s hill stations experienced their annual mayhem as tourist vehicles choked narrow mountain roads.
Roads leading to markets and commercial complexes in Manali, Shimla, Dharamshala, Lahaul and Spiti in Himachal Pradesh, and Rishikesh, Nainital and Mussoorie in Uttarakhand were packed with four-wheelers that left little wriggle-room.
Highways fared no better.
The 9.2km Atal Tunnel in Himachal Pradesh, which links Kullu with Lahaul and Spiti, was particularly affected, as roughly 12,000 vehicles made their way through the route on Sunday, according to officials. Another 45,000 vehicles entered Shimla between Saturday and Monday, said officials, bringing traffic in the hill town to its knees and keeping locals and tourists stuck on the roads for several hours.
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Shimla superintendent of police (SSP) Sanjeev Kumar Gandhi said: “The town has parking facilities for just 4,500 vehicles. We now have 13 bottlenecks in the town.”
The police also started halting cars 15km outside Shimla for a minute each, in a bid to relieve the stress on the town.
Similarly, the traffic prompted police forces in Uttarakhand to improvise.
Pauri Garhwal SSP Shweta Choubey said, “Additional police and traffic personnel have been deployed along with deployment of home guards. Patrolling has also been increased in wake of wild animal movement and anti-social elements.”
In Nainital, police allowed only tourists with hotel bookings to enter the town in vehicles. Other tourists were stopped at the Russian Bypass on the outskirts of Nainital.
Hotels and guest houses, meanwhile, were booked well into the new year in the two states, said residents and local authorities.
Amit Kashyap, the managing director of the Himachal Pradesh Tourism Corporation, said “most hotels in the state are at capacity”.
Himachal Pradesh Tourism Stakeholders Association chief Mohinder Seth said: “High-end hotels are full, but the low end ones are doing average business. We expect more tourists by the New Year.”
The jams underscore the challenge due to lack of reliable and comfortable public transport, within and intracity, which could otherwise address problems of both congestion and air pollution to a significant degree.
