Many People are looking forward to the completion of the Suhua Highway Improvement Project, so that residents of Hualien and Taitung counties on Taiwan’s east coast can have a “safe road home.”
However, it has been revealed that in late October a major collapse occurred in the Gufong Tunnel (谷風隧道), which has been bored through, but is still having work done on it. About 10,000m3 of rock and gravel collapsed into a stretch of about 300m of the tunnel, which would take an estimated eight months to clear. This is the biggest of at least 200 tunnel collapses that have happened so far during the project.
The project has been controversial from the start. The progress of an environmental impact assessment, from its submission to approval, was possibly the quickest there has ever been for a major construction project.
The departments in charge of the project assured the public that large amounts of assessment data are available for reference from the previously mooted Suhua freeway plan.
However, when the project passed the environmental impact assessment, Hualien County Commissioner Fu Kun-chi said that “even the Great Wall of China did not require such a long time for preparation,” implying that the project underwent the most rigorous review in history.
However, following this supposedly super-rigorous review, the project has run into a series of hitches. Its route had to be changed because of protests when locals realized that it ran through ancestral graves in the Aboriginal village of Wuta (武塔), and then again following landslides caused by Typhoon Saola in 2012. Since then, work has been delayed again because the original assessment was not thorough enough to detect the archeological remains at Hanben (漢本).
Although October’s collapse was not the first, it involved almost as much rock and gravel as there was in the nation’s biggest-ever collapse, which took place in the Hsuehshan Tunnel (雪山隧道) in 1997, burying a tunnel boring machine, and killing and injuring several tunnel workers.
The latest collapse highlights the difficulties involved in building the road under such geologically sensitive conditions.
Over the past few years, the Suhua Improvement Engineering Office has done as much as humanly possible to finish the work on schedule, while paying due attention to safety.
However, it faces the same problem that caused large-scale flooding in the New Yongchun Tunnel (新永春隧道) during construction of the Taiwan Railways Administration’s North Link Line.
The problem is that the Central Mountain Range contains a vast amount of water and when water penetrates into the rock strata, which consist mainly of marble and other kinds of metamorphic rock, there is no way to accurately predict where it will flow. As a result, tunnel collapses caused by water penetration can easily occur and this is the main reason why more than 200 collapses have occurred since work started on the Suhua project. These incidents demonstrate the intrinsically difficult conditions involved.
When people talk about a “safe road,” it should not only mean that the finished road is safe to use, but also that the construction is carried out safely.
When the most recent collapse happened, the office reacted quickly by evacuating all of its personnel from the tunnel, so that although some machinery was damaged, no one was injured or killed. This shows how important vigilant monitoring, thorough risk management, good judgement and quick decisions are for ensuring safety.
When the improved Suhua Highway is eventually opened to traffic, the departments in charge of it will have to give top priority to the lives and safety of the public, and do a proper job of risk management and control.
One unfortunate aspect of the latest incident is that it came to light through the media, rather than the office releasing the information of its own accord. The office should reflect upon this, assess further difficulties that might yet happen during construction and make its information public so that people living in eastern Taiwan and the public at large can know what is going on. Above all, it must not sacrifice safety for the sake of pushing ahead with the construction.
Environmental groups have been monitoring the Suhua freeway and improvement projects for a long time, and have repeatedly played the role of unwelcome prophets by pointing out possible risks, yet they have often been blamed for delaying construction.
As long as 10 years ago, realizing that it would be hard to build the road in such a way that traffic would never be cut off, some people who care about transport in eastern Taiwan suggested the idea of providing more and better non-road transport, and this idea now seems more important than ever.
Although road transport is necessary, the Suhua Highway is restricted by the geological structures through which it runs. To ensure safety, there need to be emergency response and control and management systems, and cutting off traffic must remain an option when necessary as the ultimate safety measure.
To relieve eastern Taiwan’s traffic problems, there should also be complementary channels other than road transport. Rather than being fixated on roads, the nation should more actively assess railways and sea transport.
Rather than getting hooked on politicians’ slogans about a second phase of the project, the right remedy for curing eastern Taiwan’s transport ills is to seek multiple complementary solutions.
Tsai Chung-yueh is a consultant for Citizen of the Earth, Taiwan.
Translated by Julian Clegg
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