New platform to prevent drowning accidents

As several children were playing by the Shuhe River in Xuzhou, Jiangsu province on July 2, a drone flew into the area, hovering at a low altitude and warning them: "Deep water is dangerous! Please leave immediately!"

As summer vacation started, many places in the prefecture-level city of Xuzhou conducted drowning-prevention drills for minors, but unlike in the past, this year's drill featured the province's first-ever drowning prevention intelligent analysis platform, jointly built by State Grid Jiangsu Electric Power Co, People's Procuratorate of Xuzhou and others.

"Every summer, we repeatedly tell our children not to go near the water, but as we are busy with our own work, we can't always be with them. The anxiety never fades," said Liu Yanzi, a parent, after observing the drill. "The new platform replaces human monitoring with intelligent monitoring, using new technologies to truly relieve the worries of parents during the summer vacation."

Chen Daoming, who is in charge of a sub-district's emergency safety, admitted that every summer, child-drowning accidents have become a persistent problem in grassroots governance, citing his sub-district as an example.

"There are about 40,000 residents under our jurisdiction and over 6,000 of them are minors, accounting for some 15 percent," he said, noting that the Shuhe River and the Xinmo River traverse the area, and there is a reservoir extending for 15.5 kilometers.

"The water flow here is rapid and the pressure to prevent drowning is immense," he said, noting that previously, human patrols couldn't cover all the water and time periods, and there were blind spots. Moreover, weak awareness of drowning prevention in some people also posed a severe challenge to the oversight work.

To address these problems, State Grid Jiangsu put Xuzhou — which administers some 9.02 million people living in two county-level cities, three counties and five districts — as a pilot area and began to build a drowning-prevention platform in collaboration with the local procuratorate and some others.

A total of 736 cameras, including those on transmission poles near open waters in Xuzhou, as well as cameras on poles near rivers, lakes, reservoirs and other bodies of water deployed by multiple co-building units such as the water conservancy department and the tower company, were jointly connected to implement full-time scanning of open waters, especially deep water areas, no-swimming zones, riverbanks and other regions prone to drowning.

"When people approach dangerous water, the cameras and other monitoring devices can capture the scene and transmit the images to the platform via 5G high-speed communication technology," said Yin Long, a transmission line maintenance employee at State Grid Xuzhou, adding that "The platform then uses artificial intelligence algorithms to intelligently identify abnormal situations and trigger real-time warnings."

"The platform will promptly send alarm information to the duty personnel of the minor drowning prevention monitoring and early warning center, while generating a QR (quick response) code containing the latitude and longitude coordinates at the same time," he said.

By manually verifying the alarm, the duty staff can scan the QR code to directly view the alarm location on a map application, quickly locating the site to guide on-site handling, said Yin.

To further reduce safety risks, power grid inspection drones will also be dispatched to the site to send warnings and persuade people to leave the area, he said.

The drowning prevention intelligent analysis platform entered test phase on June 20 and officially launched operations on July 1.

Statistics show that during the test period, it issued more than 110 alarms to employees at the center, of which more than 64 percent were alarms concerning children's safety. Drones were dispatched more than 30 times to patrol the areas and persuade people playing in the water to leave.

"This effectively achieved water area monitoring and safety early warning, largely reducing the occurrence of drowning accidents," said Yin.

In recent years, State Grid Jiangsu has continuously focused on issues related to child safety, regularly promoting safety issues and hazard prevention at school, and using virtual reality and other devices to simulate accidents such as electrical shock and accidental falls from heights.

This has helped to guarantee the safe development of children, expanded the knowledge of safe electricity use to thousands of households and bolstered the foundation of personal safety, Yin said.