The first phase of the environmental impact assessment process for planned improvements to the Suhua Highway, which runs along the east coast from Suao (蘇澳) to Hualien (花蓮), was passed after just 14 days — quite possibly the quickest ever for such a controversial and major project. Last month, Typhoon Megi badly damaged the highway, causing a heavy toll of injuries and deaths. Unfortunately Hualien County Commissioner Fu Kun-chi has seen fit to blame environmentalist groups for the tragedy, thus causing discussion of an important policy issue to lose its rational focus.
When serving as an environmental impact assessor for the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) from 2005 to 2007, I took part in impact assessment work for a plan to build a freeway between Suao and Hualien.
At the end of 1999, in the run-up to the 2000 presidential election, the then-governing Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) proposed building a freeway between Suao and Hualien and the plan passed its impact assessment in four short months. In fact, it was put forward and passed as an incidental motion at an environmental impact assessment conference.
No lesson was drawn from the inaccuracy of the geological survey carried out for the Hsuehshan Tunnel (雪山隧道), then under construction, which led to a collapse when workers boring the tunnel struck a fault zone. Groundwater gushed into the tunnel, taking the lives of several talented engineers, ruining the costly boring machine and causing the loss of a great quantity of groundwater that had accumulated over tens of thousands of years. Nor was any consideration given to the fact that the proposed freeway would cut through 11 geological faults and up to 10 other geologically sensitive areas.
The motive for the rushed approval process was clearly to win votes by pushing through a populist policy without regard for the consequences. It is precisely the fact that the Suhua freeway plan was from the beginning motivated by political considerations that ensured it would not proceed smoothly. As things turned out, the Democratic Progressive Party won the presidential election, and the new government vacillated over whether to build the freeway or not. Political considerations continued to greatly outweigh professional ones.
In 2006, the Ministry of Transportation and Communications delivered an environmental impact assessment report to the EPA that said the route should be changed to avoid faults that might cause groundwater to seep or gush into tunnels. This route change had to be made precisely because not enough drill cores had been taken in the initial survey. Nevertheless, at the time, the only material presented for reference by the Taiwan Area National Expressway Engineering Bureau to a series of assessment committee meetings was the geological conditions the Taiwan Railways Administration encountered when it was digging the New Yongchun Tunnel (新永春隧道) for its North-Link Line. No thorough borehole survey was done for the road project, so the impact assessors could not be fully confident about the project and it was repeatedly delayed.
The 2008 presidential election saw the KMT regain power. The original idea of building a new road as an alternative to the Suhua Highway gave way to improving the existing roadway, and responsibility for planning the project was given to the Directorate General of Highways. In spite of these changes, the improvement project still faced the same problems as the earlier freeway plan in relation to route planning and geological challenges for sections of where long tunnels were needed.
However, the directorate’s response when people raised doubts about geological problems was just the same as the bureau’s. Meanwhile, the Taiwan Professional Civil Engineers Association ran newspaper ads calling on the government to proceed and build the proposed Suhua freeway. The message of these ads was very much along the lines of “mankind can conquer nature.”
I would like to ask all those who are currently blaming environmental groups whether they have calmly considered the fact that it is the failure of planning departments to carry out a proper geological survey that has fed the doubts about the geological conditions and prevented both the freeway and improvement project from being cleared up. The project remains mired in controversy to this day. Shouldn’t the ministry be held responsible?
If construction goes ahead regardless of the conditions, costs are sure to rise far above the original budget, followed by endless spending on maintenance and repairs. The promise of non-stop work may have contractors smiling, but it would be bad news for everyone else.
Danger and safety are relative concepts. The crucial point in deciding policy on this issue is to reduce the abstract notion of “danger” to the level of concrete problems and turn the aim of “safety” into effective solutions. Fu cites a figure of more than 1,000 deaths on the Suhua Highway over the past decade as proof that the highway is not safe, and draws the conclusion that either a freeway must be built or the existing highway improved.
However, when Chang Sheng-hsiung (張勝雄), a professor of transportation management at Tamkang University, analyzed data compiled by the National Police Agency and the Institute of Transportation, he found that the accident mortality figures quoted by Fu are actually for the entire 475km length of Provincial Highway No. 9, which runs the full length of the east coast from Taipei to Pingtung, rather than just the 80km section that is the Suhua Highway.
Traffic on the Suhua Highway section was only obstructed by landslides for a total of 25 days between 2002 and 2008, and just five people were killed by these landslides. In contrast, 46 deaths on the highway resulted from drunk driving, overtaking on the wrong side of the road or speeding. Evidently, apart from the heavy loss of life brought about by the most recent typhoon, most of the other accidents have been caused by human factors.
Drawing an “equals sign” between the call for Hualien residents to have a safe road home on the one hand and the Suhua Highway improvement plan, or revived calls for a Suhua freeway, on the other, is not the right prescription. It may be that neither of these plans can resolve Hualien residents’ pressing problems.
Safety should be the No. 1 requirement, but that doesn’t mean there is only one option. This point has been made and explained in detail numerous times by environmental groups. Life is priceless, but people are not the only things that have a life. These considerations probably explain why Master Cheng Yen (證嚴法師), who established the Buddhist Compassion Relief Tzu Chi Foundation, continues to oppose the Suhua road projects, albeit in a low-key way.
Chan Shun-kuei is chairman of the environmental law committee of the Taiwan Bar Association.
TRANSLATED BY JULIAN CLEGG
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