Father and son team spend night saving flooded pumping station

BẮC GIANG — An elderly father and his son took turns submerging themselves under flood waters all night long to save a pumping station.

Early in September 2024, Typhoon Yagi hit Bắc Giang with severe human casualties and property losses. Many locations were submerged under water, with river levels in the province rising up above alarm level 3, threatening the dike system with a possible breach.

On September 12, there was a leak in an underground chamber causing an emergency at Cống Bún Pumping Station. If the issue was not solved quickly, the water could have breached a dike segment on the Thương River, causing severe floods and unfathomable consequences for the wards and communes southwest of Bắc Giang City and the neighbouring industrial zones as well as Việt Yên Town.

Residents will never forget that at that critical moment, Nguyễn Văn Lúa, born in 1961, and his son Nguyễn Văn Hai, born in 1987, from Đồng Quan Hamlet in Bắc Giang City's Đồng Sơn Commune, worked all night to save them.

The father and son team submerged themselves deep under the floodwater to close six doors leading to three pipes connecting the River Thương and the outward chamber at Cống Búng Station, located on the right-hand-side third level dike on the Thương River in Bắc Giang City. They helped stop the chamber from destruction, thus successfully preventing larger-scale flooding that would have impacted thousands of households and several industrial zones.

Trần Văn Hiệu, the manager of Cống Bún Pumping Station, said that the station has three gates with six doors that were programmed to automatically open and close depending on the level of water pressure. When the flood raised the water level above alarm Level 3, the water pressure did not affect the level sensor, resulting in the doors remaining open.

"We needed to have someone to dive down to check if the doors were stuck with any soil or stone, as they could not close. We had to tie a cable to the door knob so that people on the ground could try to close them by hand," he said.

"The danger was that the chamber would burst. Closing the doors was of utmost importance to ensure that even if the chamber burst, water from the Thương River could not overflow via the tubes to cause more flooding," Hiệu added.

Local authorities in Đông Sơn Commune called on Nguyễn Văn Lúa and his son because they were great swimmers and divers, who knew the River Thương and its bed well. The pair had saved many lives on the river.

Nguyễn Văn Lúa, said that at 4pm on September 12, after his son received a call from a man at the Đông Sơn Commune authority, they put off whatever they were doing to head straight to the station.

Without any further hesitation, they made up their minds to close those doors at all costs to save the station and save the Thương river dikes.

With several dozens of years of diving experience behind him, Nguyễn Văn Lúa first used tools to find the depth and location of the pipe gates and position himself above them to save time in diving.

Due to the depth and dirty floodwaters, he almost couldn't see anything under the water. He didn't have any diving equipment, only relying on his ability to hold his breath for a long time under water.

When diving, Lúa had to blindly find the hook points for the cable so that people above could pull the doors closed. After several hours and multiple dives, he finally hooked the cable to four of the six doors, helping close them.

The remaining two doors couldn't be closed by the same method, because they were stuck with heavy stones. Due to the water pressure and the long hours working under water, blood eventually burst out from Lúa's mouth and nose. His son, Nguyễn Văn Hai, ordered him to take a break and he dived down instead.

Hai wore a gas mask connected to an oxygen pump so that he could breathe and work underwater longer in order to remove the stones.

When he got down to the gates, he found that all four doors that were previously closed from above did not fit the frames properly, so he had to follow the cables, pull them all closed and even more carefully tie them together with more cables.

As for the two doors that were blocked with heavy stones, he had to remove the stones and clean the surface so that he could close the doors tightly.

After many hours of diving and working under pressure at eight metres deep, both father and son succeeded in getting all the doors to the pipe closed and secured.

When he came back to the surface, he felt heavily weighed down from fatigue, but he was happy because they accomplished their mission. All the people at the site cheered and applauded the father and son team.

"We got home exhausted at 4am," Hai said.

After their unceasing efforts to save the pumping station in an emergency, Lúa and his son Hai were awarded a Certificate of Merit from the Chairman of the Bắc Giang Province People's Committee. — VNS