On April 24, the 2026 citywide video conference on reservoir safety during the flood season was held. The reporter learned from the meeting that in addition to unveiling a series of “hard measures” to ensure flood safety and maintain reservoir security, the city will also equip reservoirs with a “smart brain” through digital means, creating an integrated monitoring and perception network covering sky, ground, water, engineering, and human factors.
“The flood season is approaching, and the city’s reservoirs have fully entered a defensive state,” said the relevant official from the Municipal Water Resources Bureau. Reservoir safety during the flood season has always been a top priority in the city’s flood and drought disaster prevention efforts. The city’s existing reservoirs exhibit three high characteristics: a high proportion of small reservoirs, a high proportion of earth-rock dams, and a high proportion of aging dams. Issues such as infrastructure aging and remote, scattered locations are prominent. Coupled with frequent extreme rainstorms and sudden floods, reservoir safety faces multiple challenges.
According to forecasts, this year’s flood season will present a complex situation with “prominent risks of extreme disasters and alternating floods and droughts,” placing higher demands on engineering resilience, response measures, and dispatch coordination. The official from the Municipal Water Resources Bureau stated that the key to ensuring reservoir safety lies in “prevention,” with the crux being “strictness.” This year, the city has rolled out a series of “hard measures” for reservoir flood safety to guarantee the bottom line of security.
Elimination of Dam Risks: Accelerate the reinforcement and repair of dangerous reservoirs, simultaneously carry out termite control, reservoir capacity dredging, and flood damage restoration, and legally downgrade or decommission reservoirs that have lost their functionality.
Strict Control of Reservoir Capacity: Treat flood control capacity as a “cornerstone,” comprehensively review capacity curves, strictly investigate encroachments on reservoir capacity, and prohibit unauthorized operation above flood-limited water levels.
Closed-Loop Accountability: Update and publicly list the “three responsible persons” for reservoir safety management for each reservoir, ensure full-coverage training and round-the-clock duty, and enforce the strictest constraints to implement accountability.
At the same time, the city is conducting pilot reforms for unified county-level management in Youyang, Fengdu, Beibei, and Yongchuan, promoting “unified standards, unified resources, and unified assessments.” This integrates scattered management forces from townships into professional teams to address the management challenges of small (Type-2) reservoirs, improve the detection rate of hazards, shorten rectification cycles, and enhance management efficiency.
“We are also building a digital intelligent prevention system to transition from ‘human prevention’ to ‘technical prevention,'” the official added. The city is equipping reservoirs with a “smart brain” through digital means, including fully launching the construction of a reservoir operation management matrix, integrating all data on water levels, rainfall, engineering conditions, and video surveillance to create a “sky-ground-water-engineering-human” integrated monitoring and perception network, enabling one-screen overview and comprehensive early warnings.
For example, Beibei has launched an “AI + water safety” intelligent supervision system, using drones to complement manual inspections for automatic alerts. Zhong County has built a digital twin reservoir, adding GNSS monitoring, underwater robots, and drone nests to significantly improve the timeliness of early warning responses.
To strengthen joint prevention and control efforts, the city is enhancing cross-departmental coordination and further reinforcing cross-regional collaboration with Sichuan and Guizhou. It is improving the joint dispatch mechanism for reservoir groups along the Yangtze, Jialing, and Wu Rivers, leveraging the flood retention and peak reduction functions of reservoir groups to minimize flood impacts.
On the other hand, focusing on extreme scenarios such as power outages, road closures, and network failures, the city has fully reinforced emergency preparedness across all links—conducting thorough pre-flood inspections for hazards, establishing records, implementing timely rectifications, and maintaining closed-loop management. It is refining “one reservoir, one policy” plans, detailing evacuation routes, shelter locations, and group support. Comprehensive, realistic emergency drills are being carried out to familiarize the public with evacuation procedures, and rescue teams, materials, and equipment are being pre-positioned on the front lines to ensure early detection, early response, and early resolution of dangers.
