Binjiang Police Affairs-Chapter 866 - 588: Shares Mean Authority! (Part 2)

With straw hats on their heads, armbands on their arms, and wooden sticks in hand, they diligently searched every grass slope, forest, rice field, and house behind the levee, from the top of the levee down to four or five hundred meters into the fields.

The sun scorched during the day, and mosquitoes bit at night. Sometimes it poured rain, sometimes they were tortured by hunger and thirst. But behind them was their home, and even if they fell ill and fainted, they would get up and persist.

The piping seepage was about two hundred meters from the river levee, and cadres and the masses had surrounded the dozen or so water seepage points with sandbags, forming an area as big as a basketball court.

The sandbags, over two meters high and more than a meter wide, formed a circular large pool.

Nearly a hundred young and strong laborers, under the organization of cadres, were busy laying geotextile or transporting gravel. Sand and silt particles were trapped between the gravel and the seepage channels, and the leaking water was gradually turning from turbid to clear.

Insiders see the principles, outsiders see the excitement.

Although Xiao Chen and Liu Wei were not water conservancy experts and had limited education, they had participated in flood control skills training organized by the camp. Seeing this scene, they were instantly terrified.

Because several pumps were chugging away there, but the water in the "pool" seemed inexhaustible.

This meant that the volume of seepage water was enormous and that a water level balance had already formed inside and outside the levee. If leaks outside the levee couldn’t be found and plugged timely, such piping seepage would be hard to stop, potentially expanding until the levee collapsed!

A county leader worried that the Ministry of Water Resources experts couldn’t understand the local dialect, anxiously said in heavily accented local Mandarin, "Here, the difficulty in handling piping seepage lies not in its frequent occurrence or large area, but mainly because the facing slope of the levee is steep, and the water in front of the levee is deep and fast. No matter how much stone material we throw, it’s hard to pile up..."

Although it’s a tributary outside the major embankment, the water flow is indeed very rapid.

001, modified from a tugboat, had great power, worthy of being called a "small cannon." During navigation and docking, it was already heavily affected by the water flow. If it were replaced with a hundred-ton cargo ship, sailing against the current would be strenuous, and maintaining a stationary state on the water for stone-dropping to block the leaks would be even harder.

The two of them worried in silence for the thousands of residents behind the major embankment when they heard the county leader complaining to the Water Resources Department leaders up ahead.

They were short of everything now, barely having anything. Even the woven bags for filling with earth were brought from home by the masses voluntarily.

Seeing that almost no one wore life jackets, Xiao Chen couldn’t help but pull aside someone looking like a cadre and ask, "Brother, don’t you have a flood control material reserve?"

"No."

"You didn’t prepare flood control materials in advance!"

"..."

The middle-aged cadre stared intently at Xiao Chen, thinking about how out of touch he was.

Xiao Chen didn’t know what the person was thinking and turned around to point at the levee, "Why don’t you get a larger, more powerful ship to transport stones? A big ship can stay put and throw stones directly at the levee foot from the river."

Where to find a big ship, not to mention where the stones would come from...

The middle-aged cadre was so angry he wanted to hit someone, but knowing this youngster might be an escort of a leader, he couldn’t afford to offend him, so he just turned away and left.

Xiao Chen realized he had hit a wall and didn’t dare ask more.

At this moment, the Water Resources Department leaders had basically figured out the situation. On the advice of water conservancy experts and Master Xi accompanying them, they immediately called for the necessary ships and materials for the rescue, though it didn’t sound like they could hurry up.

It’s urgent everywhere, and the available rescue resources are limited. There’s a real scarcity, so it all has to "queue up," and the needed rescue materials on their side won’t arrive until tomorrow evening at the earliest.

In a flash, it got dark.

Local cadres provided dinner to the leaders.

Dinner was simple, just rice with a few pickled long peppers, the same for everyone participating in the rescue, all squatting on the spot to eat.

This meal was much worse than on 001.

Xiao Chen found it hard to eat, but seeing both Master Xi and Master Xu eating there, he could only force himself to eat.

Back on the ship, looking at the expected faces of the cadres and masses seeing them off, Xiao Chen muttered, "There’s nothing here. This piping seepage hazard looks serious, but if it were our camp handling it, we could resolve it in no more than three hours, with no need to wait until tomorrow or the day after, let alone worry."

The speaker said it casually, but the listener took it seriously.

The concerned expert from the Water Resources Department turned around to ask, "Young man, can you seal the leak in three hours?"

"I can’t seal it alone; I meant our camp."

"Which camp?"

"Our Linghai Reserve Camp, if you don’t believe me, ask Master Xi or Master Xu."

"Master Xi, is this young man joking?"

Master Xi paused before smiling wryly, "Xiao Chen isn’t boasting; if their camp were here, handling such a hazard wouldn’t even take three hours."

The Water Resources Department leaders also heard this and, barely believing their ears, questioned doubtfully, "Master Xi, could you be more specific?"

"Xiao Chen is both an employee of the Linghai Port Tug Company and a reserve soldier in the Linghai Reserve Camp. Their reserve camp was established according to the Jiangnan Provincial Committee, Provincial Government, and Jiangnan Province Military District’s requirements, relying on more than a dozen major entities along the Yanjiang and the Linghai Economic and Technological Development Zone, forming a Flood Control and Rescue Mobile Assault Battalion."

Master Xi, unscrewing his tea cup, took a small sip of water and continued, "In military terms, they should be considered an amphibious rescue force, capable of mobilizing both maritime engineering ships and onshore engineering machinery and transport vehicles, unlike our side, which relies entirely on human labor for flood control."

Deputy Director Xu asked curiously, "What kind of engineering ships do they have? Which engineering machinery can they mobilize?"

"They can call up a high-power tugboat anytime, one that was built by our Hanwu Channel Shipyard, costing over 16 million. They can mobilize a floating crane ship, which is like those waterway floating piers used to transfer cargo from ten-thousand-ton freighters to inland river freight ships, and they can even mobilize car ferries."