en.Wedoany.com Reported - Nansha District in Guangzhou, China, recently launched a basin-wide management system to prevent ship-bridge collisions. The system has installed active collision warning devices on 22 district-managed bridges and integrated warning data from 14 bridges under other ownership, enabling data sharing and interoperability among the government, bridge owners, and maritime authorities. This marks the first basin-wide bridge safety management model in China.
Nansha has a well-developed waterway network, featuring 12 core channels and 61 navigable bridges, with over 300,000 vessel transits annually. Previously, the common practice across regions was a "one bridge, one management" approach, which suffered from short warning distances, data silos, and insufficient emergency response buffers. Based on the characteristics of local navigation, Nansha has divided control zones according to natural waterway systems, deployed remote smart checkpoints at river entrances and exits, and established a closed-loop handling process of "entry screening—en route monitoring—bridge area warning." It also coordinates multiple departments for zone-based and tiered management, enabling early identification and intervention of risky vessels.
Currently, Nansha has set up five long-range smart warning checkpoints on key waterways, adopting a management model of "navigation reservation + dynamic forecasting + big data screening," supplemented by 24-hour manual monitoring. This forms a prevention and control network covering entry screening, waterway patrol, bridge area warning, and closed-loop hazard management.
Since its trial operation in January this year, the system has issued 7 warnings for vessel over-height and over 5,800 warnings for vessel deviation. Staff have manually intervened in nearly 3,000 high-risk vessel transits. After the implementation of the new control system, the vessel risk warning distance has been extended from the traditional 500 to 1,000 meters to 3 to 10 kilometers, and the pre-incident emergency response time has been advanced from 5 to 10 minutes to over 1 hour.
