I’m a little hesitant to categorise this as ‘news’, but that’s the category it fits best, so whatever.
You, know, in all my time in Beijing, I’ve only been caught in two really huge, kick-arse thunderstorms, both around August-ish, and both with lzh. The first was the summer just before we moved out to Tongzhou, three years ago now, when, on the way back from flat hunting, we got caught in a storm so huge we had to open an umbrella inside the bus. Alright, the bus roof was kinda holy, in the full of holes sorta sense…. Anyway, when we got off the bus we had to run half a kilometre through water that was at best ankle deep, and getting home meant stripping off and thoroughly showering and washing the clothes we had been wearing (pollution + rain = acid rain nastiness to both our bodies and our clothes, and such a huge thunderstorm + mid-summer = potential for nasty colds). The second storm was just a couple of weeks ago on our way back from Yanqing, and was just as huge and as heavy with the same results when we got home. The first storm hit us in central Chaoyang, at Bawangfen/Soho/China Central Place/Blue Castle sort of area and continued to pound us for the three km south to BeiGongDa and the half k run over to home on Wusheng Lu. The second hit us real hard at Madian Qiao and we had to wait for it to calm down before we considered going anywhere.
Now, I’ve narrowly avoided or got caught in some real doozies of summer storms in my years in Beijing (and in Taiyuan and Changsha, for that matter, although in both those cities I almost always managed to be at home when the storms hit. Almost always) but nothing as big as those two. So I would like to state, for the record, that although lzh is certainly a mosquito magnet (apparently her blood is too sweet, while mine is too sour or bitter or something), I certainly have no proof to suggest that she may in any way be a kick-arse huge storm magnet. I was just saying those were the two biggest storms I’ve ever seen in Beijing.
So I’m not at all convinced by that article that the Olympics in anyway carry any greater a risk of lightening or thunderstorm strike than anything else in Beijing in any August. And besides, my storm experience of downtown Beijing has been pretty evenly distributed across the city, so I can’t see how the Olympic area is at any greater risk than anywhere else.
But then again, I am an English teacher, and not a meteorologist.
