Newlywed official Li Ruhao rushes along the disaster relief road
"Ruhao, do you know how many days it's been since you came home?"
"It's been about ten days, Qixuan. I know I shouldn't have left the day after our wedding, but you know the situation right now..."
Li Ruhao, a 25-year-old village official in Shangdian Village, Shangtushi Town, Huoshan County, Anhui Province, quietly put down the phone. In his heart he knew he owed his newlywed wife far too much, but the village had been severely hit by catastrophic flooding and desperately needed recovery and reconstruction.
Zhang Taizhi's Trichosanthes (gualou) greenhouse base had been blown down by the wind, and he had to help find more people, or all 40 mu of Trichosanthes would be ruined; Li Jing's farmland had more than 10 mu affected, with all the rice seedlings planted this year submerged, and if he didn't help with replanting soon, there would be no harvest at all this year; the stone bridge leading to the intersection by the primary school had been washed out by the flood, leaving more than a dozen households there unable to get out; there were also over a hundred road cave-ins in the village, more than 500 m of water pipes damaged, and over 10 power poles and communication poles toppled or leaning, plus so many completely collapsed households, damaged households, and relocated households all needing urgent resettlement... As the first secretary of the Party branch of Shangdian Village, Li Ruhao's head swam just thinking about the village's situation. With no time to say much more to his wife who had just married into the family, he called over village clerk Wu Dianting and rushed out again.
June 30, 2016 - for Li Ruhao, this date was destined to be a day he would never forget for the rest of his life, because it was the joyous day of his wedding.
"The weather was still fine in the morning, but by evening the rain kept getting heavier. I arranged for the relatives and friends attending the wedding to head to the county town overnight if they were from out of town, and to hurry home if they were nearby, to keep constant watch on the rain and flood conditions, while those living in remote areas or in dangerous houses would stay overnight at our home..." Sure enough, the heavy rain kept falling without any sign of letting up, and it grew heavier and heavier. On the afternoon of July 1, Longjin Village in Shangtushi Town, where he was located, was completely plunged into a situation of power outages, water cuts, severed communications, and blocked roads, facing serious threats at every moment from secondary disasters such as cave-ins and mudslides.
On his wedding night, Li Ruhao was out in the heavy rain with villagers from the production team inspecting dangerous conditions everywhere, reminding every household in the village, especially the at-risk households, to pay attention to safety. Next door to his home, behind Li Shangbin's house, there was a hillside prone to collapse. Feeling that this rainstorm was severe, Li Ruhao repeatedly urged them to move into his home. Only the next day did they learn that hundreds of cubic meters of mud mixed with rocks had rushed toward Li Shangbin's house, smashing through his kitchen, breaking down the door, pouring silt into the rooms, and letting the rainwater rage straight through the house...
Thinking of Shangdian Village, where he held his post dozens of kilometers away, and not yet knowing how the disaster situation was there, how many houses had been damaged, where the households under the five-guarantees relief system had been relocated, and that the village "two committees" must surely be in a complete frenzy... The next day, Li Ruhao returned to Shangdian Village and threw himself into frontline flood control and disaster relief work. "If you have difficulties, come to me anytime - I'm right here in the village!" This was what Li Ruhao said most often to the villagers.
After the flood, Shangdian Village was a scene of devastation, with severe disaster losses. There were 93 road cave-ins, 12 road subsidence points, two bridges destroyed, and 10 culverts. A total of 14 households with 49 people were completely collapsed and destroyed, and 183 houses were damaged...
Li Ruhao saw it with his own eyes and fretted in his heart. Though young and with limited experience, he faced the disaster without despondency or panic, instead leading the villagers together with the village Party secretary in carrying out self-rescue production and post-disaster reconstruction work. In farmers' homes, at disaster sites, and in the office, his busy, slender figure could be seen everywhere.
He immediately organized the village's Party members and village representatives, seized the favorable weather, and encouraged and mobilized disaster-affected farmers to carry out post-disaster reconstruction and self-rescue production. The most severely damaged infrastructure in this flood was the "village-to-village" roads, with many both upper and lower cave-ins. He proposed adopting the principle of opening roads first and repairing them later, and immediately organized several machines and a number of maintenance workers, assigning responsibility by section, working at multiple points simultaneously and advancing together, to ensure all village and group roads could be reopened as quickly as possible and solve the villagers' most urgent passage problems. "There are nearly 100 cave-ins large and small, with more than 20 severe ones. Some lower cave-ins had just been cleared when upper ones came down again." Li Ruhao, who had caught a cold from the rain for many days, still had a hoarse voice.
The "village-to-village" cement road in Zhangjiayan Group of Shangdian Village was severely blocked, and on the hillside there was a large rock of nearly 60 cubic meters teetering on the verge of falling, constantly threatening the lives and safety of the villagers below the slope. He organized local residents to bring their own tools and, with the help of excavators and other machinery, worked together all afternoon to remove this "giant" and eliminate the threat.
At the construction site, because of his thin, small frame and limited strength, compared with the villagers who often did farm work, he had no advantage in physical labor and appeared to struggle. Villager Li Jing joked with him: "Secretary Li, you'd better stick to the pen and speak for us. Leave this heavy work to us." Everyone burst out laughing, but he still insisted on holding a shovel to help move soil and rolling up his pant legs to carry rocks. Seeing him truly throw himself into the work and get covered in mud, Li Jing couldn't help giving him a thumbs-up. Chen Bo