China faces a real shortage of qualified salvage divers: delegate
Jin Feng speaks during a panel discussion on the sidelines of the National People's Congress in Beijing.
China is short of competent salvage divers, Jin Feng, a top expert in the profession and a delegate from Shanghai to the National People’s Congress, said.
Jin, 51, is the head of the diving division and vice captain of the salvage fleet at China Ocean Engineering Shanghai Company, which is historically known as Shanghai Salvage Company.
The company, a public institution under the Ministry of Transport, is in charge of salvage tasks along the coast from Lianyungang in Jiangsu Province to the border between Fujian and Guangdong provinces, and in the meantime a towage and ocean engineering contractor and diving equipment manufacturer. The company led a consortium which salvaged the wreckage of South Korean ferry Sewol in 2017.
Established in August 1951, it has completed about 2,000 salvage cases and 1,500 wreck removal cases, saved over 20,000 lives and removed over 26,000 tons of underwater oil pollution along the Chinese coast.
The company has about 60 divers, and there are 300 to 400 divers in total from all public institutions like the Shanghai company around the country, Jin said.
“We collaborate with commercial diving companies and other organizations in many tasks because otherwise we couldn’t have enough people to perform the tasks,” he said, adding that the divers from his company work six to eight months every year on average, which is a huge workload.
But divers from commercial companies are often inferior to professionals trained for salvage tasks in terms of diving skills, equipment and ability to handle some cases, Jin said.
“A salvage diver has to have high physical and psychological preparedness for the job,” he said. “It usually takes seven to eight years for a rookie to grow to be a diver who can perform the most basic skills underwater independently.”
It takes up to 20 years for a salvage diver to become a true master of the job, he added.
The profession is not well recognized by the public or the government. In its latest catalogue of professional qualifications in 2017, the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security didn’t include it, Jin noted.
“As a result, salvage divers can’t get qualifications for their skills, which doesn’t help retain divers because many will give up their career halfway,” he said.
This, in the long run, will have negative consequences on China’s ocean strategies, he said, and he called for the government to enable qualifications for salvage divers as soon as possible.
But another problem is that government salvage companies are only allowed to hire divers with at least a high school diploma, but very few of those people with high school or higher diplomas will consider taking this job, Jin said.
Meanwhile, to better plan for emergency rescue actions, Jin suggested that systematic analysis and categorization of different scenarios is necessary.
In October last year, a bus crashed into the Yangtze River in the southwestern city of Chongqing and was stuck some 75 meters underwater. Some divers who don’t usually serve in salvage cases offered to help, but they couldn’t dive deeper than 60 meters.
In China, divers going below 60 meters usually use a kind of artificial air which replaces nitrogen with helium to prevent neurological detriments known as nitrogen narcosis in deep diving, while in some other countries, the standard is 50 meters, Jin said.
“All government salvage companies have such artificial air, but only a few commercial companies have it and it’s more often used in industrial production than in salvage cases,” he said.
In the end, professional salvage divers completed the task.
Jin suggested that systematic rules should be introduced and implemented in emergency cases such as salvage operations so as to both protect rescuers and more efficiently carry out rescues.
