“With the raging typhoon at sea, many merchant ships were astonished to see our ship and shouted at us by radio, "The center of the typhoon is in your front. Please make sure you are heading the right direction." “We replied firmly that ‘It is our direction! We are going to rescue the people trapped there!’” Pei Jiwen, Senior Chief Engineer of the Nanhai Rescue Bureau of the Ministry of Transport of P.R.C., said sonorously.
“Distress hit me that day, but we had no choice.” He Shenglan, Deputy Director of the Maintenance Center of the Haidong Highway General Section of the Highway Administration Bureau of Qinghai Province, recounted an experience six years ago. Enduring the mud rushing into their nose in a heavy rain, He and her workmates half-squatted in the culvert, lifting up and dumping out buckets of mud. They worked so hard that they didn’t notice when the rain stopped.
“To build a satisfactory transportation, we are struggling on the front-line.” On June 23, Publicity Department of the CPC Central Committee held a briefing for Chinese and foreign journalists, in which five Party members from the transportation industry shared their stories of struggling on the front-line.
The maritime rescue crew always work on the sea for a long time. Over the past 30 years, Pei Jiwen has celebrated Chinese New Year at sea for 20 times. Back then, he received an order and returned to the ship no more than a month after his marriage. One year later, he came home and found his son was already half a year old. At the first sight of his son, he just stood there dumbly and didn’t realize that he had become a father until he held the infant in his arms.
In July 2015, two culverts in the Ceke-Mohan section of Qinghai Provincial Road 213 were blocked by the heavy rain. However, the narrow space of the culverts allowed manual clearance only. As a Party member and the head of the workers, He Shenglan endured the stench and took the lead to enter the culverts. Encouraged by her and other Party members, all the workers bent down into the culverts and worked with shovels and pickaxes. When the culverts were dredged, the rain had stopped and the stars in the sky lit up, but He Shenglan and her workmates were shivering with rainwater and mud from head to toe.
“As a Party member, what I am most proud of is the building of a container terminal through independent innovation by our team, which is the most advanced one in the world and the first fully automated one in Asia.” Zhang Liangang, a high-level expert of Shandong Port Group Co., Ltd. and leader of the “Liangang Innovation Team”, described the transformation of port automation he witnessed. In 1983, for a 50000-ton fertilizer ship docked at the wharf, it required more than 200 workers to load and unload cargoes in four shifts day and night for about 8 to 10 days, while the same operation volume in the current automatic terminal only takes about 6 to 7 hours, a 30-time increase in the comprehensive operation capacity.
The “Liangang Innovation Team” has completed the development and construction tasks of 8 to 10 years abroad in mere 3 and a half years. At present, the operation efficiency of Qingdao port automatic terminal is 50% higher than that of the European automatic terminal. “In the past, during our visit to European ports for investigation and study, we were forbidden to take cell phones or to see or to get out of the car. Now, however, we have the self-confidence to receive European study delegations, to allow them to observe and take photos on site, because our core technology is not on the surface, but in our background and our brain.” Zhang Liangang straightened up and said.
Chen Wei, Deputy Director of Shanghai Pudong Maritime Safety Bureau, shared the story of her zero breakthrough in Out Of Box Audit (OOBA) in the directly affiliated maritime system. On 29 April 2005, Chen successfully investigated and dealt with the first violation of false and concealed declaration of dangerous goods, achieving a zero breakthrough in OOBA in the directly affiliated maritime system. On 29 April 2021, OOBA was included into the newly revised maritime traffic safety law as a maritime regulatory measure. An exploration 16 years ago and years of grass-roots practice finally developed to a provision of the maritime traffic safety law.
In the past, subway trains were driven manually, but now they are automatic with man-assisted or fully-automatic unattended; in the past, people had to queue up to buy paper tickets, but now they can scan the code and swipe their cards to enter the station; in the past, information was submitted by telephone in 10 to 20 minutes, but now the fault alarm can be sent in seconds... At the briefing, Chen Wen, Chief Dispatcher of the Dispatching Command Center of Beijing Metro Operation Co., Ltd., recalled the rapid development of Beijing Metro. He compared the Dispatching Command Center to the “strongest brain” of metro network-based operation with an annual passenger volume of nearly 3.9 billion.