Cold wave grips north India
New Delhi: Biting cold gripped north India on Tuesday while dense fog caused several accidents, leaving three people dead and 40 injured and prompting affected states to take steps like suspending night operations of buses, reducing speed limit in some areas and changing school timing.
Dense to very dense fog engulfed the Indo-Gangetic plains, including Delhi, for the second morning on the trot on Tuesday, lowering visibility to 50 metres in the city and affecting road traffic and train movement.
Flight operations, however, were unaffected in the national capital, an airport official said. On Tuesday, 11 trains were reported running late by one to five hours.
Visibility dropped to 50 metres at the Palam and Safdarjung airports in Delhi between 5.30 am and 7 am, an IMD official said.
The Safdarjung Observatory, the primary weather station in Delhi, recorded a minimum temperature of 6.3 degrees Celsius, two notches below normal. The maximum temperature is likely to settle around 22 degrees Celsius.
The minimum and maximum temperatures are likely to drop to five degrees Celsius and 20 degrees Celsius in the next few days in Delhi.
Satellite images showed a thick layer of fog over Punjab, Haryana, Delhi, north Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh in the morning.
Taking note of the dense fog and accidents due to it, the Uttar Pradesh government on Tuesday evening stopped plying of state roadways buses at night.
One person died and 24 were injured when a bus collided with a truck amid low visibility due to dense fog on
the Yamuna Expressway in Greater Noida, Uttar Pradesh, police said.
In a separate incident, a truck loaded with lentils hit the divider of the highway and overturned in the Dadri area of Greater Noida, police said.
In view of reduced visibility due to fog, the upper speed limit on the Noida-Greater Noida Expressway has now been fixed at 75 km per hour from 100 km per hour, officials said on Tuesday evening.
The upper speed of vehicles has also been capped at 65 km per hour on some other routes in Noida, and motorists violating the speed limit order will face legal action or penalty or both, according to an official statement.
In Bulandshahr, a truck driver was killed and six people were injured in a pile-up involving several vehicles on the Bulandshahr-Aligarh road in Arnia, police said.
Two of the injured are undergoing treatment in Aligarh and Bulandshahr, police said, adding a few others who sustained minor injuries continued with their onward journey.
In Kaushambi, Nitish (25) was travelling with his friend on a motorcycle when their two-wheeler hit a stationary truck near Sayara overbridge on the Prayagraj-Kanpur road around 9 am due to low visibility, police said.
Nitish died in the accident while his friend was referred to SRN Hospital in Prayagraj in critical condition, they said.
