Illumine Lingao (English Translation)

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Chapter 4: Port Construction (Part 1)

From an outsider’s perspective, the beginning of D-Day was both chaotic and spectacular. The harbor, which had maintained its pristine subtropical scenery, was now bustling with small boats shuttling back and forth. The derricks on the ships continuously lifted and lowered cargo. A dense crowd of people was disembarking from the huge ship via the gangway. The sandy beach was dotted with signs of different colors, indicating landing sites for personnel, vehicles, and equipment, as well as cargo dumps, liaison points, and registration desks.

The entire camp in the port area was centered around the Bopu Inspection Office and the beacon tower behind it. From the perspective of future port development, this location was not ideal. The mangrove forest extended all the way to the sea, and the surrounding area was not open enough. However, the existing buildings of the inspection office and the artificial high ground of the beacon tower were rare advantages for the transmigrators. But while the Ming officials and soldiers had fled in disarray, another kind of creature brought a small bit of trouble to the transmigrators.

Shortly after the military group occupied the building at dawn, before the search was even complete, several people were bitten by fleas in the house and had to flee. Old-style brick and wood structures were breeding grounds for pests, and fleas and bedbugs were common residents. Before the large-scale production and use of DDT and BHC in the 1940s, parasites were long-term inhabitants of any old building, especially wooden ones. In 1945, Naples, Italy, even had an outbreak of typhus spread by fleas. Fortunately, the US military sprayed large amounts of DDT, eliminating the hosts and curbing the epidemic. Only since then have most cities in the world been freed from the problem of these parasites that had plagued them for millennia.

As the head of the health group, Shi Niaoren had long anticipated such a situation in his sanitation plan. The epidemic prevention team he led landed right after, dressed in full protective clothing, high boots, masks, and goggles. The team, carrying sprayers on their backs, reminded the military group of Unit 731. They entered the houses and began spraying insecticide vigorously.

The medical and health group used a 150x water suspension of 6% wettable BHC, spraying it in all corners of the rooms and on the furniture. Then they sealed the doors and windows for 30 minutes to kill the fleas, bedbugs, and other pests inside. All the dilapidated furniture in the rooms—mats, bedding, clothes, etc.—was carried out and burned on the beach. As for the few military group members who had entered the houses, they were unceremoniously sprayed from head to toe with the insecticide solution and then sent back to the main ship for a bath. Each of them was also pinned with a special orange-red tag made by the health group, indicating they were lightly infected.

After half an hour of fumigation followed by an hour of ventilation, the Landing Command Post immediately occupied the three-bay main hall of the small courtyard as its office. The side rooms, which had been the archers’ dormitories, were also cleaned out and used as a server room and a warehouse for valuable items.

The strong smell of BHC disinfectant still permeated the rooms. But for the command post, none of this mattered. The radio was set up, maps were spread out on the tables, and soon, powered by battery packs, the server started working. A wireless local area network was established. Through signal amplifier antennas, the laptops at various landing sites and unloading points could now directly transmit data to the server. A tide of data began to flow continuously into the server: the human resources group had set up registration points at each landing site to record the disembarkation of the transmigrators. The planning commission had also dispatched scanning personnel to the unloading and stacking points to start recording the entry and exit of materials and equipment.

On the Fengcheng, the transmigrators, organized into various groups, were lining up to disembark group by group according to the human resources group’s arrangement. The knock-off US military backpacks were so heavy they were suffocating. This was just the issued equipment; their personal luggage was still sleeping in the bottom hold, scheduled to be unloaded last.

The ship’s loudspeakers repeatedly broadcast Executive Committee Directive No. 16280002:

  1. All actions must follow command; no unauthorized actions are permitted.
  2. No one may cross the camp perimeter without permission. Those who need to for tasks must register at the perimeter guard post when entering and exiting.
  3. No urinating, defecating, or littering in random places. Garbage must be sorted and disposed of in designated garbage pits.
  4. Food and water must be obtained from designated supply points. No private hunting, fishing, or consumption of game is allowed.
  5. If you notice any abnormality in your own or others’ health, you should seek help from the medical point immediately.

To use labor rationally, dispatch personnel efficiently, and avoid having some people working while others are idle, the Landing Command Post invented an armband system.

The dispatch of work was uniformly scheduled by the human resources group of the Landing Command Post. In the human resources group’s tent, there was a large table with a large-scale map of the Lingao Cape-Bopu Port area spread out on it, covered with transparent paper. The various professional groups and labor groups were represented by numbered cards of different colors, placed in the areas where they were working. After dispatching a job, the human resources group would clip hairpins symbolizing the labor intensity onto the card—one for light, two for medium, and three for heavy—to avoid large disparities in labor intensity between the groups.

Although this icon system was simple, when used in conjunction with the labor management system in the OA system, not only could the human resources group clearly know the current work content, location, and workload of each group, but they could also see what tools and how much material each group had received. This greatly facilitated the dispatch and management of labor.

On the sandy beach south of the harbor, a large military tent was temporarily set up. A sign was erected at the entrance with a few crookedly painted characters: “Bopu Port Area Construction Command Post.” All the technical personnel in architecture, planning, design, and hydrology among the transmigrators were gathered here. The “Project Number One” they had just completed was now in full swing. Various engineering equipment and materials were being continuously unloaded via the floating pier. With a material basis, the construction of the port area base naturally had to be fully launched.

Inside the tent was a conference table and folding chairs taken from the ship. On the table were laptops and many bound volumes of hydrographic data. Although there were technical personnel from all fields here, everyone’s main focus was on the four people leaning over the map at the table:

These were the so-called “Four Great Heavenly Kings” of the architectural engineering group. Of course, Li Xiaolü was a woman, but no one could compare to her in terms of the number of certificates she held. However, she had little practical experience in construction and did not like to be in the limelight. So, Mei Wan was the leader of the four. After all, he had spent the most time on construction sites and knew a little about everything.

“The command post requires us to complete the basic infrastructure construction of the port area before dark today: power supply, water supply, setting up unloading and stacking yards, and completing simple fortification work,” Mei Wan relayed the instructions. “We have priority use of materials, machinery, and labor.”

“Team Leader Mei, we haven’t even done the surveying yet, so we can’t produce a planning map. I’ve compared the surveying data we brought, and the terrain here is quite different from the 21st century,” said Li Xiaolü.

“There’s no time for too much detail,” Mei Wan said. “Fortunately, this is not our main construction base, so it doesn’t require too much planning. We’ll focus on small-scale temporary projects.”

“We’ll survey, design, and construct at the same time,” Mei Wan, having been on construction sites, was very familiar with how to rush a project. He immediately divided the work. Li Xiaolü and Yan Quezhi were responsible for the surveying work of the port area. Surveying was both a technical and a physical job, so another basic labor group was assigned to them as assistants. At the same time, the military group issued them a five-shot shotgun for self-defense.

Tian Jiujiu was responsible for the water supply and drainage of the camp area, Chang Kaishen was responsible for the power supply business, and as for Bing Feng, his task was the most arduous: building the cargo stacks.

In comparison, Chang Kaishen’s business was relatively easy. The Executive Committee had prepared all kinds of power generation devices and many supporting power transmission and transformation equipment, but at this moment, these things were still sleeping in containers. As a temporary port camp, there were few points of electricity consumption and the overall load was small: mainly for lighting, office electricity for the command post, and a few electric loading and unloading machinery. The power load was relatively small.

Based on this demand, this simple early version of the power grid should strive for simplicity, reliability, ease of operation, and minimal use of materials. Therefore, Chang Kaishen’s plan was not to build a power station on shore, but to draw power directly from the auxiliary engine of the Fengcheng. Although the main engine of the ship was stopped after anchoring, the auxiliary engine was still running, providing energy for the entire ship. The power group would directly pull a 380-volt cable from the ship’s distribution room, fix it along the floating pontoon bridge, and extend it to the shore-based distribution station for power distribution. The entire power grid used the simplest radial connection method. This connection method was also the most common method in China’s rural power grids in the past. Its disadvantage was that when a line failed or was under maintenance, the power supply to all users on the line had to be temporarily stopped. However, this was still acceptable under the current circumstances. The only thing that needed an uninterrupted power supply was the operation of IT equipment in the office, which could be met by using a UPS backup power supply + high-power battery packs.

However, in the actual project, the design of directly fixing the power cable to the floating jetty was overturned. The Executive Committee’s opinion was that it might leak electricity, was unsafe, and the line being fixed on the jetty with frequent traffic of people and vehicles could be unintentionally damaged. The engineering group immediately changed the design. They dismantled a set of backup floating units and strung the empty barrels together with steel wire ropes, floating them on the water. Each barrel was also hung with a counterweight to maintain its stability on the water. This floating line, originally intended for power transmission, soon played a greater role: first, a floating fuel pipe was set up to draw diesel from the ship, and then the communications group pulled the ship’s telephone line directly to the shore. In this way, the Fengcheng could directly contact the command post by phone and even send faxes without using a walkie-talkie. The biggest benefit was that the IT group’s Shi Kai used this telephone line to realize a network connection. Now all the computers on shore could directly access the server on the ship through the landing command post’s server to transmit data in both directions. The OA system had achieved full coverage.

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