Rescuers dispatched by helicopter and ship rappelled down a rocky escarpment yesterday hoping to find 21 Chinese tourists whose bus is believed to have tumbled off the narrow Suhua Highway in Yilan County last Thursday as Typhoon Megi neared Taiwan.
Rescue officials said they have found body parts in the area, but no definitive identifications had yet been made. Debris from the bus found along the escarpment suggests that the vehicle might have fallen off the road and into the sea more than 300m below.
Military personnel continued looking for survivors or bodies on land, in the ocean and by air.
PHOTO: CNA
Relatives of the missing tourists have accused a Taiwanese travel agency, Taipei-based Chuang Yi Travel, of failing to take precautions as Megi struck. A Chuang Yi spokesman was not immediately available for comment.
At least 13 people have been confirmed dead in Taiwan from the typhoon, including nine buried alive when a mudslide covered a Buddhist temple in Yilan County, which sustained a record-setting 114cm of rain. Twenty-five others remain missing.
Hundreds of volunteers from the Buddhist Compassion Relief Tzu Chi Foundation were dispatched yesterday to help flood victims.
PHOTO: CNA
The eight-hundred members of the Buddhist charity, including doctors, teachers and retired policemen, followed another 1,200 volunteers who were sent to Nanfangao (南方澳) in Yilan a day earlier.
Traveling at their own expense, the volunteers brought cleaning equipment and medical supplies to help residents repair their homes and provide medical services.
Meanwhile, Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) lawmakers accused the central government of failing to act fast enough in response to Megi’s record-breaking downpours.
The government failed to close the roads and bridges quickly enough, DPP Legislator Pan Meng-an (潘孟安) said. Public furor over the dangerous roads, he said, should increase pressure for the government to build a more comprehensive rail network in the area.
The rail plan was outlined in the proposed eastern development act (東部發展條例), a controversial proposal announced by the DPP last year. The recent problems with the existing road infrastructure should spur Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers into backing the DPP agenda, Pan said.
“For the last year, the DPP proposal has languished under the KMT [in the legislature]. It is regrettable that it hasn’t even been included on the legislative agenda,” he said.
However, KMT Legislator Lin Tsang-min (林滄敏) said the DPP should take the blame, since the project was postponed during former president Chen Shui-bian’s (陳水扁) administration. Only now was the government working to make it happen, he said.
“The DPP cannot finish it, so the KMT will complete it,” Lin said, adding that the project would give Hualien and Taitung county residents “a safe route home.”
Minister of the Interior Jiang Yi-huah (江宜樺) declined to say whether the families of Chinese tourists killed in the disaster would receive compensation based on the National Compensation Act (國家賠償法). Whether Chinese families could file for state compensation was a matter for the Ministry of Transportation and Communications to decide, he told a legislative committee convened to discuss the Suhua disaster.
The interior ministry would pay NT$1 million (US$32,600) in compensation to each Taiwanese victim of Megi, following the precedent set after Typhoon Morakot in August last year.
Chinese tourists are not entitled to such payments because they are not citizens of the Republic of China, he said.
Families of the Chinese tourists who were killed by Megi could receive an insurance payment of up to NT$5 million, he said.
Deputy Minister of Transportation and Communications Yeh Kuang-shih (葉匡時) said there had been many accidents on the Suhua Highway in the past, but none led to state compensation payments.
Mainland Affairs Council Vice Chairman Chao Chien-min (趙健民) said government agencies have been focusing on rescue and road clean-up and would discuss the issue of compensation later.
Premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) said he could empathize with the families of the victims and the administration would continue the search for their loved ones.
As for compensation, Wu said he believed the tourists’ insurance company would take care of the matter according to their contracts.
Meanwhile, New Zealand singer Hayley Westenra, who is in Taipei as part of her Asian Tour 2010, sang Amazing Grace at a press conference yesterday as a prayer for Megi’s victims.
Westenra said she heard about the disaster that Megi had wrought in Taiwan before she left her hometown on Sunday to fly to Taipei. She’s from Christchurch, New Zealand, which was hit by a magnitude 7 earthquake last month.
She said her heart went out to the storm’s victims in Taiwan, and as a singer, she would like to bring warmth and consolation to those who have suffered, through her voice and songs.
Hayley, a UNICEF ambassador, won the hearts of Taiwanese audiences last year when the soprano sang The Moon Represents My Heart in Mandarin with Taiwanese pop singer Aska Yang (楊宗緯), former lead singer of Shin Band (信樂團), at the opening of the Kaohsiung World Games.
ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY KO SHU-LING AND CNA
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