With this hydraulic equipment, it is both 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" buoy boat, maintenance workers from the Wangcheng Navigation Affairs Office of the Changsha Navigation Affairs Center in 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 via 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, fixing the ship-shaped buoy in the correct position. They then lifted the iron anchor and accurately dropped it into the water. In less than half an hour, the abnormal 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 turbulent, and floating debris increases, significantly raising the risk of buoys being overturned or displaced. However, inland waterway maintenance has long faced the practical challenge of "small boats unable to accommodate large equipment." Most of the main maintenance vessels in Hunan are 25-meter-class buoy boats, characterized by shallow draft and low freeboard, with limited reserve buoyancy and stability margins. The bow operation deck space is cramped, and directly adopting the configuration of large maintenance vessels is not feasible. It would not only fail to fit but 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 difficult 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 combining a "comprehensive hydraulic control station + hydraulic crane + hydraulic winch + hydraulic flipping and anchoring platform." The hydraulic crane parameters were set to a lifting capacity of 0.5 tons and a boom length of 5.2 meters to control load increments 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" buoy boat was upgraded, and the main navigation maintenance operations of the Wangcheng Navigation Affairs Office were mechanized.

In 2024, the center extended the mechanization concept to barge storage by optimizing shelf layouts, introducing simple gantry cranes and hydraulic forklifts, and streamlining the complete operational chain from "equipment storage—transfer out of storage—anchor stone transportation—anchor stone deployment—buoy placement." This achieved full mechanization of maintenance operations from the warehouse to the water surface.

The reform has yielded remarkable results. According to statistics, the deployment time for a 10-meter steel ship-shaped buoy has been reduced by 40%, and the placement of a single buoy now requires only three people. The positioning error of anchor stones has been halved, the buoy displacement rate 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 buoy boats across 10 grassroots navigation offices in 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 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.