Chapter 299: The Transportation Bottleneck
Under Tang Menglong’s management, the Jiazi Coal Mine quickly entered normal production. Jiang Wenli, true to her training in the administrative class, immediately put her learning into practice and soon had the entire mine’s administration up and running. She was responsible for all the daily administrative affairs of the mine.
Various work records, files, and ledgers for the mine were established one after another, and the rules and regulations were complete. Of course, there was sometimes a bit of dogmatism, as she rigidly adhered to the Coal Mine Administrative Management Manual written by Ye Yuming. Tang Menglong, although a geologist, had many friends in the mining industry and had seen the management styles of both state-owned and private coal mines. He immediately made some guiding modifications to make the rules more practical.
Jiang Wenli had originally accepted the position of personal assistant to Mine Manager Tang out of a sense of “obeying the organization’s arrangements.” After all, the chiefs always needed women to take care of their daily lives—washing clothes and cooking during the day, and sleeping with them at night. For a country girl who had once been ragged and hungry, this kind of life was quite good. She was infinitely grateful to the chiefs who had rescued her from starvation, given her clothes, taught her to read, and even given her a name. She was willing to do whatever they asked of her. As for any feelings for this sturdy, dark-skinned, and rough-handed chief, of course, there were none to speak of.
However, in her half a year at the National School, she had developed a reverence for knowledge. “Knowledge is power.” The chiefs themselves were the living embodiment of this concept. It was knowledge that enabled them to make iron ships float on water, build cannons that neither the government troops nor the pirate lords dared to provoke, and earn endless wealth. All of this had completely overturned the shallow worldview of this country girl. She had become a fanatical believer in the “omnipotence of knowledge.”
Tang Menglong’s simple guidance had made the management system she had painstakingly devised with all her knowledge and wisdom more concise, reasonable, and especially practical. This not only made Jiang Wenli once again feel that the chief’s wisdom was as “vast as the sea,” but also gave rise to a little bit of spontaneous affection.
Tang Menglong, of course, didn’t care whether she was fond of him or not. Since she had been assigned to him, she was his. Although her looks were not particularly charming, his physiological hormones overcame his cultural aesthetic standards. As soon as work stabilized a bit, he “rectified” her. That night, he went at it three or four times, which almost made the over-thirty Tang Menglong unable to get up the next day.
“Overindulgence, overindulgence,” Tang Menglong muttered as he struggled to get up and dress with Jiang Wenli’s help, his back aching. The steam whistle outside had already blown twice; it should be 7 o’clock. The whistle started blowing punctually at 5 a.m., then once every hour. The third whistle at 7 a.m. was the signal to start work. He fumbled for his watch. It was 6:50. He had to hurry to the office, or the miners would laugh at him.
The guard at the door saluted him with his rifle. Tang Menglong gave a weak wave, wondering if the guards had overheard his “heroics” last night. Speaking of which, what was the point of having a guard at his door besides showing off? He looked doubtfully at the high walls and watchtowers of the compound.
The entire mining area was surrounded by a double wall of cement-bonded bricks and stones, guarded by bastions and watchtowers, and encircled by a trench. It was even more solid than most of the local fortified villages. Once the gate was closed, several thousand people without siege machinery couldn’t break in. This level of security was not without reason. During the construction phase, they had already spotted people spying from a distance. The locals might not know what all the things on the mine were, but they instinctively knew they were valuable.
Tang Menglong ate his breakfast in the office. It was a special dried rice noodle from the Grassland series, sprinkled with dried meat, dried seaweed, and dried shrimp. It looked quite colorful.
“It would be nice to have some fresh vegetables,” Tang Menglong said to himself.
His wish was soon granted. Jiang Wenli was also in charge of logistics and managed the food supply. The mine’s stock of Grassland rations could only last for a short time. The long-term supply of vegetables and grain was handled by Lin Baiguang’s “Wanfeng Rice Shop.” Like any traditional Chinese peasant in any era, she immediately thought of growing vegetables and raising chickens wherever she went. She got many kinds of vegetable seeds from the Heaven and Earth Society through Lin Baiguang, and also borrowed a dozen chicks and ducklings. Then she started a sizable vegetable garden in the mining area. Tang Menglong praised her greatly for this. Fresh vegetables just picked from the garden were always tastier than the wilted ones transported by the boats.
The prostitutes were also organized. Besides their flesh trade, they also washed and mended clothes for the miners—for a fee, of course. Tang Menglong had initially worried that the prostitutes would be unwilling to do this work, but to his surprise, they were quite enthusiastic about it, sometimes even not charging the miners. He later realized this was also their way of attracting regular customers.
Under the strict modern management system and with perfect logistical support, the miners were very productive. After all, the coal miners under the Transmigration Group were paid by piece-rate, and their income was directly linked to how much coal they mined. Tang Menglong set a minimum quota of 18 tons for each squad—in reality, many squads could complete 20 or even 25 tons, which was quite good for a mining squad using only picks, shovels, and wheelbarrows.
Tang Menglong even considered launching a Stakhanovite labor competition, but then he thought that if he did, the mine’s inventory would grow even larger.
As the mine manager, of course, the more coal mined, the better. But Tang Menglong was troubled by the transportation problem.
At the beginning of the operation, it was precisely because of the limited transportation capacity that they had not invested in mining machines. Now it seemed that even the output of manual labor exceeded the transportation speed.
Using 12 transport boats to carry coal, with each boat having a capacity of 5 tons, the round-trip voyage from the Nandu River pier to the Hai family’s pier was over 40 kilometers. Although the journey was downstream when fully loaded, the speed was only five or six kilometers per hour. The return trip was empty, but against the current, the speed was even slower. A round trip, including unloading time, took 8 hours. Now that the days were getting shorter and the nights longer, it was not convenient to sail on the Nandu River after dark. Each boat could only make one round trip a day, so the daily transport capacity of the 12 boats was only 60 tons, while the daily output of coal was at least 400 tons. As a result, a large amount of coal was stranded in the mine’s storage yard.
The daily backlog of production piled up higher and higher in the mine’s storage yard. This was a serious problem for the Jiazi Coal Mine, which had no modern loading and unloading equipment and relied entirely on manual labor. Tang Menglong had no choice but to order a reduction in mining shifts and conduct military training instead, to avoid accumulating too much coal.
Small mountains of coal piled up in the storage yard, and they couldn’t be transported out for a while. The boilers couldn’t burn much either, and they couldn’t export electricity from here. Tang Menglong had no choice but to communicate with Lin Baiguang and ask him to request more transport boats from Lin’gao.
“Transport boats are not the main problem,” Lin Baiguang believed. The key was not that there were too few boats, but that they made too few trips.
“The hydrological conditions of the Nandu River are not bad. When I came on the transport boat, I felt the river was very wide and not shallow. Why can’t we sail at night?”
“Boss, you make it sound so easy. There are no navigation marks on the Nandu River, and the channel hasn’t been dredged. Sailing in the dark is bound to lead to grounding or hitting a reef.”
Lin Baiguang had no solution for this and had to report it to the Executive Committee and ask for a solution.
“I don’t think just adding more transport boats will work,” Jiang Ye said at the Industrial and Energy Committee’s work meeting. “We need to increase the tonnage of the ships.”
“I agree. This type of transport boat was originally designed for rivers like the Wenlan River, which are shallow and have a distinct dry season. The size is too small. It’s not suitable for the Nandu River. We should build larger ships. You know, the barges that transport sand, cement, and coal on the canals can carry 1000 to 1500 tons at a time.”
“You’re talking about steel-hulled ships. How can our wooden ships compare?”
“How deep is the water?” Wang Luobin asked.
“The Nandu River is the largest river on Hainan Island, and the Haikou section is at the mouth of the sea. The navigation capacity should be pretty good,” Jiang Ye said. “We could get a few flat-bottomed sand boats, load them with coal at the Jiazi pier, and sail them directly back to Lin’gao. This would also save the trouble of transferring from small boats to large boats in Haikou. The Qionghai Coal could then be used for other tasks.”
“That’s not necessarily true,” Wang Luobin said. “If you’ve been to Haikou, you’ll know that one of the most profitable businesses there is sand dredging on the Nandu River. The riverbed is quite silted up. The river looks wide, but the water is not necessarily deep.”
Luo Duo said, “The average water depth of the lower reaches of the Nandu River is about 2 meters, which is not shallow—but that’s the depth after the modern construction of the Songtao Reservoir. The Nandu River and the Wenlan River have the same characteristic: the water volume varies greatly between the dry and rainy seasons. However, there should be an average water depth of about 1 meter year-round, which should be fine for ships of thirty to fifty tons.”
“Since we’re short on steel now, and the Nandu River hasn’t been dredged, we could build a wooden flat-bottomed boat according to the standards of the Ming dynasty canal transport ships, with a displacement of 31 tons and a cargo capacity of 15 tons, right? The draft seems to be only 0.75 meters,” Zhou Bili said.
“A ship like that would have to have a mast,” Wang Luobin said. “Otherwise, with too much cargo and insufficient power, it would be difficult for the crew to control and dangerous to sail.”
“I didn’t say it wouldn’t have a mast…”
Yan Quezhi, however, shook his head and smiled. “You’re all just making assumptions.” He picked up his notebook. “It was my suggestion to send small transport boats to the Jiazi Coal Mine to transport coal. Let me show you the 1957 survey report on the Nandu River by the Ministry of Water Resources’ Design and Exploration Bureau.”
The navigable channel of the Nandu River, from Chengmai to Haikou, was about 100 kilometers long and could accommodate small boats with a maximum carrying capacity of no more than 10 tons. During the dry season, there were 9 shoals with a water level of only 0.3 meters, and 6 shoals with a water level of 0.3 to 0.5 meters. Wooden boats with a carrying capacity of 4 to 9 tons had to rely on the boatmen to get out and push the boat over the shoals.
A digression beyond the 3000 words:
The current water depth of the lower reaches of the Nandu River is quite considerable, with an average depth of 5 meters and a maximum depth of 12 meters. This is all the result of sand dredging. The Nandu River did not have a large-scale shipping industry until after the year 2000.