With this set of hydraulic equipment, it is labor-saving and safe

Recently, cargo ships have been shuttling back and forth in the Wangcheng waters of the Xiangjiang River in Changsha. During the flood season, a navigation buoy in the main channel was overturned by the current, triggering a race against time to restore the "abnormal navigation buoy."

On the "1103" navigation buoy boat, maintenance workers from the Wangcheng Navigation Affairs Office of the Changsha Navigation Affairs Center of Hunan Province used a simple gantry crane in the barge warehouse to lift a 300-kilogram iron anchor and a 150-kilogram anchor chain in sequence, transferring them onto the boat with a hydraulic crane. At the bow operation platform, workers gently pushed the handle to operate a 0.5-ton hydraulic crane, slowly righting the overturned steel ship-shaped buoy.

On the other side, workers used a 2-ton hydraulic winch to tighten the anchor chain, securing the ship-shaped buoy in the correct position. They then lifted the iron anchor and precisely dropped it into the water. In less than half an hour, the abnormal navigation buoy was restored to normal.

"In the past, moving an anchor stone and anchor chain weighing over 100 kilograms required carrying them on our shoulders and lifting them by hand, which was labor-intensive and unsafe. Now, with this hydraulic equipment, lifting, deploying, clearing obstacles, and flipping markers can all be done efficiently, saving effort and ensuring safety," said Wu Xiaozhong, director of the Wangcheng Navigation Affairs Office.

The Xiangjiang River handles over 70% of Hunan's waterway freight volume. During the flood season, the water flow becomes rapid, and floating debris increases, significantly raising the risk of navigation buoys being overturned or displaced. However, inland waterway maintenance has long faced the practical challenge of "small boats being unable to accommodate large equipment." Most of the main vessel types used for waterway maintenance in Hunan are 25-meter-class navigation buoy boats, which are shallow-draft, low-freeboard vessels with limited reserve buoyancy and stability margins. The bow operation deck space is cramped, and directly adopting the configuration of large waterway maintenance ships would not only be unfeasible but would also significantly increase the bow's weight, leading to stability issues and posing risks of capsizing during navigation and operations.

To address the challenge of "small boats being unaffordable to modify" in inland waterways, the Hunan Provincial Water Transport Affairs Center launched a pilot project at the Wangcheng Navigation Affairs Office of the Changsha Navigation Affairs Center in early 2022.

The Changsha Navigation Affairs Center independently developed an integrated hydraulic system consisting of a "comprehensive hydraulic control station + hydraulic crane + hydraulic winch + hydraulic flipping and anchoring platform." The hydraulic crane parameters were locked to a lifting capacity of 0.5 tons and a boom length of 5.2 meters to control load increases from the source. An innovative integrated hydraulic control station was designed, allowing a single hydraulic pump station to power three hydraulic devices simultaneously through a multi-way directional valve, effectively controlling the vessel's weight increase. With this, the "1103" navigation buoy boat was upgraded, and the main waterway maintenance operations at the Wangcheng Navigation Affairs Office were mechanized.

In 2024, the center extended the mechanization concept to barge warehouses by optimizing shelf layouts, introducing simple gantry cranes and hydraulic forklifts, and streamlining the entire operational chain from equipment storage and transfer to anchor stone handling, anchor stone deployment, and navigation buoy placement. This achieved full-process mechanization of maintenance operations from the warehouse to the water.

The reform has yielded remarkable results. According to statistics, the deployment time for a 10-meter steel ship-shaped navigation buoy has been reduced by 40%, and a single buoy deployment now requires only three people. The positioning error for anchor stones has been halved, the displacement rate of navigation buoys during the flood season has dropped from 35% to 10%, and each vessel can reduce patrol repositioning by 2 to 3 times per month, significantly lowering patrol and maintenance costs.

Currently, the Changsha Navigation Affairs Center has completed the upgrade of barge warehouses and the mechanization of multiple navigation buoy boats at 10 grassroots navigation affairs offices within its jurisdiction. Relying on the construction project of the first-class waterway from Changsha to Chenglingji on the Xiangjiang River, the center is building six new 29-meter navigation buoy boats and five 17-meter fast navigation boats, incorporating mechanized configurations into the standards for new vessels to meet the high-standard maintenance needs of 3,000-ton-class waterways.