Because the air quality is only NEARLY fatal...

This was a photo taken early this morning in Ningxia, in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Province of a nasty sandstorm. Visibility was limited to only a couple of thousand feet and the winds were blowing at an incredible 40 to 50 miles an hour. Can you imagine what kind of damage trillions of grains of sand blowing around at near hurricane speeds can do? How far could that sand blow over the course of a single night? 10 miles? 100 miles?

Try 800 to 1,000 miles. All the way to Beijing. In one night.

This morning when we woke up the sky was a sickly orange color and the wind was higher than normal. Coated over everything was a fine layer of gritty sand. The remnants of the sand storm in the mid-western provinces reached us overnight. When I stepped out, I could feel the grit in my mouth and the winds were sharper. However, by afternoon, the sky was normal (well for Beijing anyway), the fierce wind had died down and the only evidence was some residual sand stuck in between cobblestones on streets and corners where it was blown.