Learning the ropes to master the skills of rescue

NANNING — Deep inside an S-shaped cave in Liuzhou, South China's Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, Jiang Shengqiang and his team crawled through a passage barely wide enough for a single person.

About 80 meters underground, a caver with multiple fractures was unable to move. The rescuers drilled through rock to open a route, fixed ropes at several points and placed firefighting jackets beneath the injured man to shield him from the jagged ground as they carried him toward the entrance.

Fifteen hours after the rescue began in February 2025, the man was brought safely to the surface.

For Jiang, 39, captain of a mountain rescue team with the Liuzhou fire and rescue authority, the operation drew on skills he had spent years mastering. His determination to acquire those skills began with a rescue in 2008.

That year, Jiang and his colleagues were called after a young girl fell from a mountain and became trapped in a tree more than 80 meters above the foot of the slope.

Specialized mountain rescue techniques were still largely unfamiliar to the team. The firefighters eventually reached the girl and brought her down, but the operation took 10 hours.

"I saw how anxious her parents were, and I felt guilty," Jiang recalls. "Back then, courage was almost all we had. I knew we needed the skills to match."

His first formal training came in 2016, when he attended a course in water and mountain rescue and was introduced to professional rope techniques. From then on, he devoted himself to mastering them.

With specialized equipment in short supply in his unit, Jiang spent more than 20,000 yuan ($2,976) of his own savings on harnesses, fall-arrest devices and helmets. He bought manuals, studied training videos frame by frame and traveled to courses elsewhere in China whenever opportunities arose.

Over the years, he wore out thousands of meters of rope during training. In little more than two years, Jiang had mastered single — and double-rope techniques. By 2019, he was teaching other rescuers.

The demands on his profession were also changing.

Following the reorganization of China's fire and rescue forces in 2018, their responsibilities expanded beyond traditional firefighting to cover a wider range of emergencies. By July 2021, China had established 179 specialized mountain rescue teams with more than 3,500 personnel, including 752 rescuers qualified in rope rescue, according to the Ministry of Emergency Management.

A national plan for fire and rescue work issued in 2022 called for stronger specialist teams for earthquakes, water and mountain rescue, among other fields.

Guangxi's extensive karst landscape poses particular challenges. Steep mountains, caves, sinkholes and underground rivers are common across the region. In many cases, reaching an injured or trapped person through difficult terrain and narrow passages is itself a major part of the rescue.

In Liuzhou, Jiang began passing on the knowledge he had acquired. In 2024, a dedicated rope rescue training unit named after him was established. The training base where he works also became one of three in China's fire and rescue system certified by the Industrial Rope Access Trade Association, a UK-based organization that sets training and technical standards for industrial rope access.

Jiang has trained all 20 members of his team. Together, they have developed more than 10 rescue procedures and modified a system used to reach people stranded by floodwaters, reducing the number of operators required from eight to five. Five of Jiang's proposals were later incorporated into a national rescue training syllabus.

The techniques have been put to the test in emergencies far removed from the training ground.

After China Eastern Airlines flight MU5735 crashed in Guangxi in March 2022, Jiang joined the emergency response in Tengxian county. A seven-meter-long section of a wing weighing about 500 kilograms lay on a steep, muddy slope and needed to be moved without being deformed.

Jiang and his colleagues built a rope-based lowering system. With little firm footing on the slope, they cleared soil, secured the wreckage and lowered it to an evidence collection area. The operation took four hours.

In August this year, Jiang found himself in a very different situation.

Heavy rain had flooded many parts of Ningming county in Guangxi, cutting off villages along the Mingjiang River. Jiang led an advance team across more than 30 kilometers of flooded terrain, at times wading through waist-deep water, to assess conditions and relay information from isolated communities.

He later joined crews evacuating residents by inflatable boat through flooded streets.

During one trip, an elderly resident frightened by the rising water gripped Jiang's arm.

"It's all right. We're firefighters," Jiang said. "Our boat is safe."

Over 19 years in the fire and rescue service, Jiang has taken part in more than 4,000 emergency operations and helped rescue more than 300 people.

At the mountain rescue training ground in Liuzhou, Jiang still carries a descender that has been with him for six years and used more than 1,000 times. Its metal surface has been rubbed bright.

"We do rescue work," Jiang says. "The better we master our skills, the more we live up to the profession."

XINHUA