The riverside park along the Chingmei River (
"It's the first time the water has risen so high in 20 years," said Mr Peng, a sales person with a pharmacy supply firm. He sat with two others outside the firm's warehouse on Mucha Road, Sec. 4, washing off bottles of detergent so that they could be repackaged and sold.
"The boss doesn't have insurance on the stock," he said, "so we must do this to minimize the damage."
The water level had been rising rapidly during heavy rains the night before, and on the morning of Nov. 1, overflowed the dike on the western bank of the Chingmei River.
"The water rose very fast," said Steven Grant, a teacher at the Katherine American School, which has a kindergarten on Wanfang Road. "It was like a massive flash flood."
"The damage for this kindergarten alone is around NT$1.5 million," Grant said, showing the watermark, which was over shoulder height on the first floor. The houses behind the school, located in a depression, suffered even greater damage.
"Someone from the government came to ask us to estimate our loss. Well, everything on the first floor was destroyed," said Chen Chiu-nan (
"There is plenty still to do," he said, pointing to the furniture piled up outside. "We haven't washed any of that yet."
The street outside still had a thick coating of silt, making it dangerously slippery to walk on.
"I was at work when it happened. And there simply wasn't time to remove things to safety," Chen said.
The Taipei City Government announced an additional two days leave for people living in the flooded areas. "We don't really have much choice," Chen said, "We'd have to take days off anyway, to get all this stuff cleared up."
"This area used to flood all the time," Chen said, "It was only after they decided to move the [Taipei City] Zoo here that they built the dike. And then, the dike on the other bank [where the zoo is located] is much higher than it is over here. When our first floor was inundated, there was a full arm's length of dike on the far bank."
On the main street, the flooded office of the Wanfang Pump Station hinted at the inadequacy of facilities. "The pump station was flooded and the machinery burnt out. So what good is this kind of solution," Chen said, exasperated.
Down by the river, a group of volunteers were working to clear weeds from the railings along the river, "to help drainage."
Emphasis had been placed on clearing main transport arteries so Mucha Road and Wanfang Road was cleared within a day of the floods. "They had the army out clearing the mud yesterday," Grant said. Soldiers were still busy clearing the area around the Mucha MRT station.
"Two years ago we made proposals for subsidizing the raising of the land level in this area," Chen said, "but all I got was some vague answer from the city government. They might build pump stations for us, but we can see [from the flooding of the Wanfang Pump Station] that this is not adequate."
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist
A fossil jawbone found by a British girl and her father on a beach in Somerset, England belongs to a gigantic marine reptile dating to 202 million years ago that appears to have been among the largest animals ever on Earth. Researchers said on Wednesday the bone, called a surangular, was from a type of ocean-going reptile called an ichthyosaur. Based on its dimensions compared to the same bone in closely related ichthyosaurs, the researchers estimated that the Triassic Period creature, which they named Ichthyotitan severnensis, was between 22-26 meters long. That would make it perhaps the largest-known marine reptile and would