SHANGHAI: With the temperature hovering above the 37 C for most of the week, many people might think working in a freezer would be a pretty cool time.

They would be right.

Inside a freezer in northern Shanghai's Longmen Aquatic Products Freezer Plant, the temperature is fixed at an icy minus 18 C all year round. The people who work in the freezer must wear thick padded coats, hats, boots, kneepads and scarves.

Outside, a cold white fog lingers around the freezer's heavy doors. When they open so Ji Jiahua can unload some frozen squid and hairtails, the forklift driver experiences a teeth-rattling temperature drop of some 55 degrees within seconds.

"You get used to it after some time," Ji told China Daily. He has worked at the plant for six years.

Ji and his colleagues log long hours both in and out of the freezer every day. When they check the inventory, they sometimes stay inside the freezer for as long as four or five hours at a time.

"But if you stay inside too long you will chill yourself to the core, no matter how heavily you are dressed," Ji said.

After just a few minutes inside the freezer, a photographer discovered that his lens was covered with a heavy frost that he had to scrape off.

"Many of the old workers here suffer from rheumatism or arthritis. If you are not well protected, the coldness gets inside your bones," Zhang Xingshun, who has worked in the freezer for more than 20 years, told China Daily. "It's against the rules to enter the freezer not fully protected from the cold. When you get a chill and the sores comes up, it feels worse than dying."

Working inside a freezer is a specialty profession, and, according to State regulations, freezer workers must retire at the age of 55, five years earlier than other workers, said Zhang.

"I like it here," Ji said. "I enjoy my colleagues and the environment is fine."

Inside the freezer, cartons filled with beef, pork, fish and shrimp are piled up to the roof, covered with a thick blanket of frost. The goods either arrive in container trucks from Waigaoqiao or Yangshan harbor, if they were imported, or directly from the nearby dock on the Huangpu River. They are then carried in low-temperature trucks to supermarkets and other retailers around town.

There are more than 20 such freezer plants in Shanghai, most of which are located in the suburbs. The Longmen Aquatic Products Freezer Plant has a storage capacity of 13,000 tons. It handles from one third to a quarter of all the aquatic products sold in Shanghai.

"Tuna and salmon used to be rare in the local market, but in the past two years, the price has dropped considerably," said the director of the plant, Kong Xiangsheng. "Now rock sole heads and vannamei prawns are especially popular."

Besides storing aquatic products, the plant also produces many tons of ice each day for storage use.

(China Daily 07/31/2007 page5)