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Taiwan's calamity

The aftermath has produced a political storm for president Ma Ying-jeou as criticism mounts over the government’s handling of the crisis. Over the weekend, he apologised for his government’s handling of the relief efforts. “We could have done a better job and we could have done it faster. I am sorry that we did not do our job better and faster,” he said.

Mr Liu, who runs a souvenir shop and restaurant in Jia Sian, selling products made of the area’s famous taro crop, said the official estimate of about 380 people dead in Hsiao Lin was “the most conservative number”.

Many have laid the blame for the tragedy in Hsiao Lin and other villages on the government for failing to give adequate warning when the typhoon hit and for years of neglect of the maintenance of slopes and infrastructure.

About 100m from Mr Liu’s store, the bridge linking Jia Sian to the highway sits collapsed into what is now a raging river.

“That actually fell in a typhoon last year,” Mr Liu says.

In Cishan, a town serving as the main rescue operations centre, Lu Guang complains that this was the second consecutive year that he had to be evacuated by helicopter after a typhoon destroyed roads into his village.

Mr Liu had moved into the mountains to be a primary school teacher just three years ago. “Each year the damage from the typhoons get worse than the last. Next year it will only be worse,” he says amid a drone of rescue helicopters taking off and landing.

Mr Liu says that while the government had sent engineers to reinforce mountain roads and bridges, those fortifications “just get washed away when the next typhoon comes”. He criticised the Ma government for initially declining foreign assistance. “Sure they have stepped up rescue efforts in the last two days, but so many are dead already,” he says.

Hsu Szu-chien, a political science professor at the Academia Sinica, says the biggest political damage came from insufficient leadership and “the president’s attitude, which is that of an elite which is unable to empathise with the urgency of the situation”.

Mr Liu paid homage to Hsiao Lin’s dead by spending Friday inside the Jia Sian household registration office taking photographs. Each showed the passport photograph of a villager, staring straight ahead and emotionless.

“I don’t know which of these people are alive or dead but this is the only record left of them now,” he says. “I took them so that their friends and relatives would at least have a photograph they can use at the funeral.” –

 

Kaohsiung County Magistrate Yang Chiu-hsing cut short a visit to Europe, returning yesterday (09/08/2009). He defended his decision to travel overseas by pointing out that the Central Weather Bureau had predicted the worst rain for Northwest Taiwan. The eye of Typhoon Morakot passed across Northern Taiwan from late Friday to Saturday afternoon, but most of the rain fell in the South.

Foreign trips by county magistrates during typhoons triggered widespread criticism last year.

Taipei County Magistrate Chou Hsi-wei lashed out at several local mayors Saturday for being away on overseas study trips.

Tainan City Mayor Hsu Tain-tsair criticized the military for its slow response. The armed forces mobilized nearly 3,000 soldiers to help with the evacuation of victims and to bring to supplies to isolated villages, sometimes in armored vehicles.

 

The landslide of Hsiao Lin,etc is in Kaohsiung. Why is the mayor of Kaohsiung did not take action and is also not being critized as he/she is the highest authority near the region of disaster ? Why only blame Mr Ma ? Just for political awareness.