Hualien damage blamed on land mismanagement

Environmentalists and residents in remote areas of Hualien said yesterday that Typhoon Toraji has exposed bad land management in the country, calling for the government to pay more attention to the deteriorating environment.

Officials of the Soil and Water Conservation Bureau (SWCB) under the Council of Agriculture said that Toraji's serious damage in Hualien could be mainly attributed to unusually heavy rain.

Conservationists said, however, that the real causes of the threatening mudslides were mountain agriculture, mining and inappropriate development in mountain areas.

President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) yesterday inspected Tahsiung village (大興村) and Kuangfu township (光復鄉), a village almost buried by mudslides during Typhoon Toraji which afterwards became the focus of both the government and the media.

Meanwhile, some residents of two nearby villages, Tafu (大富村) and Tafeng (大豐村), were cautiously inspecting a collapsed embankment, where two policemen of Tafu Police Substation (大富派出所) lost their lives.

"The embankment, which was supposed to protect residents of the two villages from the floods, claimed two policemen's lives due to a sudden collapse," Hawk Rumaling (赫恪), a Tafu villager, told the Taipei Times.

Accompanied by environmentalists of the Taiwan Environmental Protection Union (TEPU), Hawk yesterday investigated the protecting embankment along Garunrun River (嘉農溪), described by Aboriginals from the A-mei tribe as "a flaming river-like fire."

On the night of the typhoon, heavy rain flushed huge rocks and tree trunks down into the river and soon formed mudslides after the 20m-high, 1km-long embankment suddenly collapsed.

Two policemen on patrol, Lin The-fu (林得夫) and Tsai Cheng-tsai (蔡振財), were swept away by the rising river.

Hawk recalled that terrible night and said that he could do nothing but stay in his toilet, which was the only place built with strong reinforcement bars.

Hawk, a writer who is stationed at Tafu to document the history of Aboriginal villages since 1993, said he was just one of about 1,000 residents of Tafu and Tafeng who felt insecure when heavy rain hit.

"The cement embankment is built right on the buffering zone of the river. This violates the nature of river water," said Chung Pao-chu (鍾寶珠), head of TEPU's Hualien Chapter (花蓮分會).

Chung said that the government should have not encouraged residents to plant betel nuts because the original vegetation covering the slope had to be tilled entirely before the planting.

Chung said that Tafu village was one of numerous cases of bad land use in Hualien. Decades-long mining, mountain agriculture, and inappropriate development in mountain areas, Chung said, had made Hualien residents more vulnerable.

Officials at the SWCB said yesterday that unusual torrential rain during the typhoon might have made it impossible to prevent threats posed by mudslides.

"Such heavy rain in Hualien could only occur once [every] 50 years," said Lin Jiang-jang (林建章), an SWCB official.