By Cheng Xiaodong

WUHAN, July 9 --At the request of local government, over 300 servicemen assigned to an army pontoon bridge brigade under the Central Theater Command of the People's Liberation Army (PLA), carrying equipment including kayaks, rubber boats and civil engineering tools, were dispatched to Huangmei County in central China’s Hubei Province, for flood relief and rescue on the morning of July 8, 2020.

In the past few days, Huangmei County has suffered from disasters of landslides, embankments and water logging due to continuous heavy rain, where large amount of people were trapped and waiting to be transferred. The situation was very critical.

Being a national-level professional force for flood relief and emergency response, the army pontoon bridge brigade this time shouldered the tasks of building dikes and transferring masses in Huangmei County. At present, the transfer of the trapped masses was still under way.

It’s said that during past 22 years, this army pontoon bridge brigade has completed nearly 20 major flood relief missions and accumulated enough experience under various dangerous scenarios such as piping, breakouts and bank collapses, which has fundamentally improved its capability to carry out flood control and emergency rescue missions. Furthermore, with its mechanized and modularized equipment, the brigade has been able to quickly build a pontoon for large troops to cross a great river as wide as Yangtze river at any time.