Chapter 5: Port Construction (Part 2)

“U.C. 0079, U.C. 0083, U.C. 0093, and A.C. 0197 personnel, all assemble at Green Beach, prepare to unload vehicles.”

With the call from the walkie-talkie, several professional groups that had just come down from the jetty lazily got up from the sandy beach. The landing points were color-coded: Red Beach was the landing point from Pier 1, Yellow Beach was for small boats, and Green Beach was for the barge and landing craft. After sitting on a boat for a whole day, their legs felt a bit wobbly on solid ground. They had dropped their large backpacks at the rest stop and were all sitting on rocks, catching their breath. It was called a personnel rest stop, but in reality, there was nothing there except a small folding table with a computer and a ledger, and a large wooden sign with the words “Personnel Rest Stop.” The beach, covered with large and small round pebbles, had several signs scattered about: “Toilets,” “Water Point,” etc., indicating that these things would be there in the future.

Of these four groups, the U.C. ones were for those with licenses to drive large vehicles, and the A.C. one was for those with construction machinery licenses. Although Qian Shuixie from the North American branch had repeatedly expressed his desire to join the military group and take up a gun to defend the transmigrator regime, the professional skill he had listed—driving large container trucks—had landed him in U.C. 0079. Working with a group of people he didn’t know at all was a bit boring, but he soon found someone even more depressed than himself: Bai Yu, a military talent who had graduated with a major in armored command and had related expertise in weapons design and engineering, was now assigned to drive a tracked tractor.

To be able to start infrastructure projects as soon as possible after landing, Meng De and the Executive Committee had organized the classification of materials before loading the ship. All materials that would be needed immediately after landing were concentrated on the 1,500-ton self-propelled barge, including various vehicles, construction machinery, and infrastructure materials.

The full-load draft of the flat-deck self-propelled barge was only 1.83 meters. Although it couldn’t directly run aground on the beach like a landing craft, it could get much closer to the shore than a large cargo ship. Of course, at this depth, vehicles still couldn’t be driven directly into the water, so a floating pier, called Floating Pier No. 2, was also assembled here.

The self-propelled barge had no vehicle ramp and no derrick of its own. Fortunately, the engineering group had prepared for this. A set of vehicle ramps was installed on Floating Pier No. 2.

“Prepare to unload the vehicles! Everyone, pay attention to safety, wear your life jackets. If there’s any possibility of falling into the water, get out of the vehicle immediately. Don’t be afraid, haven’t we all driven onto a ferry before? It’s the same…” Bai Yu, as the temporary head of these four groups, gave a safety briefing while trying to boost morale.

The dozens of people looked at each other, thinking, How can this be the same? Starting a vehicle on this swaying deck, driving it onto a narrow ramp, and then down to that equally swaying floating pier—wasn’t this a bit too difficult?

Seeing everyone hesitating, Bai Yu knew that someone had to set an example. He had driven tanks in the army before, so he steeled himself, shouted, “Spot for me!” and was the first to climb onto the Dongfanghong 1202 general-purpose tracked tractor.

The roar of the tractor starting up calmed Bai Yu’s nerves slightly. The view from the driver’s cab was good, and the 24V battery started it up quickly and smoothly. Bai Yu had driven tanks, armored personnel carriers, and various military engineering vehicles in the army. Driving onto pontoon bridges or barges was a piece of cake for him. However, the current floating pier and vehicle ramp were purely handmade, knock-off products. Only heaven knew their true strength and load-bearing capacity.

He looked hesitantly at the swaying ramp on the blue water and the undulating pier below it. He started the engine, and the ship clearly drifted a bit. He didn’t have time to worry. His eyes were fixed on Qian Shuixie, who was directing with small flags. The tracks spun on the steel plate, making a grating sound as it inched onto the ramp. As soon as the tracks were on the ramp, the floating pier below began to drift, and the ramp shifted. The surrounding people were stunned. At this moment, Zhuo Tianmin from the engineering group, who was directing work on the pier, saw the situation and ran over.

“What are you all staring at! Quick, pull the steel cables!”

The engineering group had already installed four steel cables on the barge, so that they could be pulled manually during unloading to minimize the drift of the ship and the pier as much as possible.

“Pull, pull!” With his constant shouting, the people around them quickly grabbed the steel cables and pulled back with all their might. With great difficulty, they managed to get the tractor onto the floating pier.

With the first successful experience, the rest of the work became much easier. Two hours later, all the construction machinery owned by the transmigrators was on shore, parked neatly on the beach:

• Two Dongfanghong 1202 general-purpose tracked tractors, with excavator buckets and bulldozer blades.
• Four Dongfanghong 404Z1W backhoe loaders (medium-wheeled tractors).
• Four Dongfanghong 170V wheeled tractors (small-wheeled tractors).
• Ten Changchai single-cylinder diesel dump trucks.
• One 18-ton Dongfanghong wheeled road roller.
• One 25-ton mobile crane.
• Two towable concrete mixers.
• Four air compressors.

To reduce the complexity of maintenance, most of the construction machinery was from the Dongfanghong series produced by the Luoyang First Tractor Factory.

With so much equipment, it would be no problem to build a new city, let alone a small temporary base.

But Mei Wan and Bing Feng, who were in charge of infrastructure work, still felt a bit helpless. They had machinery, fuel, and electricity… but the problem was the lack of raw building materials.

The barge was loaded with a lot of steel bars and cement, but the engineering group had neither yellow sand nor crushed stone, so they couldn’t use concrete, the most common and convenient modern building material. Traditional bricks and tiles were, of course, an option, but where could they find bricks on this desolate beach? Needless to say, the Ming Dynasty’s Lingao County definitely had brick kilns, but their specific location still needed to be scouted.

Of course, some basic construction didn’t require any raw materials and could be done with what was available. Bing Feng’s task was to build a cargo yard at Red Beach. This was just a temporary cargo yard, so there was no need for ground hardening. Simply raising and compacting the ground, supplemented by a certain drainage system, would be sufficient. Based on Bing Feng’s past experience in construction companies, a project of this scale could be completed in a single morning by a team of ten to twenty migrant workers using manual tools like shovels, pickaxes, and wheelbarrows. Now that they had a full set of mechanized equipment, they had to perform even better.

The transport group thus became the cargo yard construction team. The entire Red Beach was filled with the roar of machinery. Vehicles bumped and ran back and forth, kicking up dust half a sky high. Everyone knew that the Red Beach cargo yard was under construction. The fiery atmosphere attracted the ubiquitous Ding Ding and his partner. The foreign girl was full of vigor. The temperature on the beach was only twenty-seven or twenty-eight degrees, but she was wearing a tight-fitting small vest and denim hot pants, climbing up and down to take pictures. Her two bare, snow-white legs flashed before everyone’s eyes. From time to time, she would stick out her round buttocks to get a shot, causing the blood of all the men, young and old, on the construction site to surge, with obvious physiological changes. After a series of incidents where a dump truck almost hit someone and an excavator dug in the wrong direction, Bing Feng had to reluctantly send the two of them away.

The ground of the yard had a certain slope from south to north. After measurement, they found that the slope was less than 1:10. Generally, under such slope conditions, topsoil removal was not necessary. Simply removing the large stones and miscellaneous trees on the surface would be enough before direct compaction. However, after taking a soil sample, they found that the surface layer was almost entirely loose sand and small pebbles, with poor adhesion. In the end, they still used a bulldozer to completely remove the surface sandy soil and pebbles.

Since the cargo yard was on a slope, the entire foundation was of a semi-cut, semi-fill type. First, they used an excavator to dig an intercepting ditch at the highest point of the slope on the south side to collect the rainwater flowing down the slope. Then, they dug drainage ditches on the east and west sides to discharge the water directly into the bay. The excavated soil was used as fill for the foundation.

After removing the surface gravel, the soil below was sandy soil. This type of soil has good water permeability and is stable after compaction. Bing Feng used all of this soil as the foundation soil. The fill, transported by small dump trucks, was poured onto the foundation. For every 20cm of fill, a road roller would go back and forth three times to compact it. Then more fill, then more compaction. After two consecutive rounds, it was basically completed. Bing Feng had originally planned to lay a layer of crushed stone on top of the entire yard, but they didn’t have a stone crusher, and the stones on the beach were of various sizes and irregular shapes, making them difficult to use. So, he skipped this step. The completed cargo yard was slightly higher than the ground, rectangular in shape when viewed from above, with slopes on three sides. Below the slopes were drainage ditches. On the side facing the bay, a simple road was built to the standard of a temporary road to connect to the pier.

“If we had enough steel beams, we could build a shed for this cargo yard,” Bing Feng said with some regret. “For now, we can only cover it with tarps.”

“We don’t have asbestos tiles for the roof either,” Mei Wan said.

“That’s not a problem. We can just cover it with wooden planks. Temporary buildings don’t need to be so particular. I’m mainly worried about the cement from the barges. If it gets rained on, it can only be used as earthwork for foundations. If we run out of cement, many things will be difficult to do.”

“Wooden planks? Speaking of which, where is the wood? The camp’s watchtowers, and the toilets, all need wood.”

“We are organizing manpower to unload the cargo tarps from the ships, striving to get them down as quickly as possible to cover the perishable goods,” said Dai Xie, the administrator assigned to Red Beach by the Planning Commission. “As for the wood, we don’t have any statistical data yet…”

Wood is the earliest and most widely used natural material by mankind. The transmigrators certainly would not give up this easily obtainable and easy-to-process material. From the very beginning, the human resources group had allocated a considerable amount of labor to logging.

In the minds of many, since Hainan is a tropical and subtropical island, it must be a place of swaying coconut trees and dense forests. Some even thought that Hainan was covered in tropical rainforests. In fact, due to different terrains, climate differences, and long-term man-made development and destruction, the vegetation condition of Hainan is quite complex. By the 1950s, Hainan’s forest coverage was only 12.8%, mostly concentrated in the Diaoluo, Jianfeng, and Bawang mountains in the central part of the island. Although Hainan’s forest coverage had reached 51.8% by the 21st century, it was mainly composed of artificial forests and secondary forests.

Lingao has a typical tropical monsoon climate, with distinct dry and wet seasons. The natural vegetation is mainly tropical savanna, and there have never been vast forests. Moreover, due to its long history of development, any slightly larger natural forests had long been cut down, and the quality of the secondary forests was not high. When the transmigrators prepared to demand wood from 17th-century Lingao, this was the scarce environment they faced.