Police and health professionals are holding a first-aid class at Xingke Avenue station on Metro Line 9 in Chongqing. (Photo/CQCB)
Chongqing - As China's largest municipality, Chongqing is shaped by the hills and valleys that thread through both urban centers and rural areas. In the long summer, heat alternates with heavy rain. A brief but extreme weather event can trigger urban flooding, landslides, or wildfires.
Professional crews work to find hazards and save lives before disasters strike. Chongqing Chengtou Road and Bridge Management Co., Ltd. runs an operations center that brings every identified risk point under unified management, divided into grids.
Each grid is a designated responsibility area digitally overlaid on the city's road and bridge network, guiding inspection work covering bridge and tunnel structures, power supply, slope retaining walls, drainage, and tunnel fire safety. Online monitoring sweeps bridge and tunnel mainlines and key facilities every hour, and interchange ramps and under-bridge spaces every two hours.
While the system runs online, inspectors patrol the full area daily for hazards that cameras could miss. During this campaign, a routine patrol found a loose fiber optic cable in a tunnel and addressed it immediately, preventing an outage.
A major part of this campaign is raising residents' awareness and preparedness. After all, some hazards are only visible to the people who live there every day.
That principle was also put into practice on August 26 at Xingke Avenue Station on Metro Line 9, where traffic enforcement officers, rail operators, police and volunteers taught passengers how to identify rain-related hazards, including water backflow, loose soil on nearby slopes and wall seepage. The session also included CPR training.
Part of the training is to familiarize people with the easy online reporting channel. Staff demonstrated the one-tap report function in Yukuai Ban, the city's government services app, so passengers know how to file a report on the spot.
Keeping a city safe requires broad public participation. An emerging group of mobile labor force in the city, food delivery riders, are recruited into the expanding safety net. On food delivery runs, they can spot hazards such as illegally parked vehicles, potholes, or broken pavement.
"On my delivery runs, one extra look and a quick photo can catch a hazard, and everyone gets home safer," said Fu Bin, a rider in Chongqing.
And, of course, delivery riders are often on the front lines of keeping food safe. They enter dozens of restaurants and kitchens every day and see conditions behind the counter that scheduled inspections can miss.
Voluntarily, riders can file reports of missing health certificate displays, grease buildup, ingredients not stored off the ground, or suspected counterfeit licenses through the app in one tap. With automatic location tagging and no complicated forms to fill out, the reporting mechanism is designed not to slow down deliveries. Rider reports are then routed to inspectors, who respond the same day, and platforms have expanded reward programs for them.
Chongqing launched a 100-day campaign in late July 2026 to strengthen grassroots risk prevention across the municipality. The effort runs through October and spans flood control and geological hazards, roads and drainage, water supply and food security. More than 420,000 risk points have been mapped citywide, and innovative approaches to risk prevention have emerged, such as a CPR lesson at a metro station and recruiting delivery riders for inspections.