Across China: Safeguarding power supply in no man's land

Deserts and snow-capped mountains, hail and sandstorms: Welcome to no man's land, the bleak, desolate district of Dabancheng in Urumqi.

Yang Wenping is a linesman in charge of a section of electric lines in the far western region of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. Despite being hundreds of miles away from the nearest populated area, millions of people's lives depend on Yang.

In December 2014, the first high-speed railway in Xinjiang started operation, this greatly reduced the travel time between Urumqi and Lanzhou, the capital city of neighboring Gansu Province.

To guarantee the smooth operation of the railway, experienced linesmen, including Yang, were dispatched to maintain the electric lines along the railway.

By the end of this month, Yang will have been patrolling the railway for a good two years. Under his watch, the Dabancheng section has never had any power outages.

By tapping the tower with a stone, Yang can tell, just by the sound, if there is a loose screw and can even tell the exact position of it. Yang's colleagues said few people could do this.

"I have been doing this job for 23 years -- all it is is patrolling and checking on the lines and towers. No big deal," Yang said.

The distance of the five towers under Yang's care is just five kilometers as the crow flies, but the inhospitable terrain means that he walks more than 1,000 kilometers a year.

Liu Wen, one of Yang's apprentices, said linesmen, and their 6kg tool bags, have to take a circuitous route of more than 15 kilometers to reach all of the five towers.

The region's changeable weather only makes the job more difficult. When the earth on the slopes starts to thaw in spring, the slippery ground and loose stones make navigating extremely treacherous, just one misjudged step could be disastrous. In summer, the sun beats down on the parched desert floor and temperatures can hit 50 degrees Celsius.

However, of all the weather to contend with, the wind, by far, is the most atrocious. Fine sand is whipped about and stings the skin and eyes, and sandstorms can occur very suddenly. Yang was once trapped in the desert for 10 hours because the sandstorm was so ferocious that he could barely see his hands in front of his face.

Yang and his team have developed some novel ways to predict the severity of an incoming weather front.

"If there is heavy wind, we first lean on a power pole, cover our hands with our helmets and stand facing the wind. If the wind creates a continuous sound like 'da da da' on the helmet, it means a high wind is coming. This is a warning to us -- we must get back to base as soon as possible," said Zhang Yanzhe, another of Yang's apprentices.

Being out in the wild, the threat of untamed animals is one which the linesmen must be aware of at all times.

"At the end of one patrol, five huge dogs suddenly set on us, we were lucky that our vehicle was nearby," Liu said.

In Urumqi, 37 linesmen including Yang, work side by side, day and night, maintaining over 11,300 power towers that stretch 2,380 kilometers.

Normally, a linesman often asks to be transferred to other posts after working for several years. But Yang is happy, the more time he spends up there, the more experience he has to offer, and the more valuable he is as a worker. Endi