Inaccurate forecasting, poor infrastructure and bad co-ordination were blamed yesterday for the chaotic scenes on Thursday when the capital turned into a big swamp during the heaviest downpour since 2004.
Though road and subway traffic in the city centre had mostly recovered thanks to the overnight repair efforts of thousands of workers, more than 200 flights were still delayed or cancelled yesterday.
Qiao Lin, director of the Beijing Meteorological Bureau, said on its website that on Thursday it recorded 21.5cm of rainfall at a Shijingshan district residential compound in less than two hours, the biggest downpour since a storm in July 2004 that lasted more than four hours and caused similar chaos.
'Such a strong precipitation event is rare,' he said.
But Qiao did not explain why the storm warning issued by the bureau on Thursday was blue, the least severe, with estimated rainfall less than a fourth of that recorded.
An official at the bureau's observation and forecast department declined to comment yesterday.
