Six days after Typhoon Toraji brought death and destruction to Taiwan, a visit by President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) to one of the severely affected areas yesterday highlighted political and legal difficulties that the government will face in its efforts both to facilitate recovery from the disaster and to prevent similar future catastrophes.
Chen flew aboard a helicopter to the mountainous villages of Chiayi County's Alishan township, where some 800 residents remained cut off by roads blocked by landslides.
PHOTO: CHEN CHENG-CHANG, TAIPEI TIMES
Tearful residents petitioned Chen for an immediate clean-up of gravel left by mudslides, which piled up along local river banks to heights of more than 10m during the typhoon, creating a further potential hazard in the event of more mudslides.
They also called upon the government to recycle the gravel as construction materials to enable the county to sell the gravel to fund local reconstruction work thereby helping to expedite its recovery.
The law, however, forbids the sale of gravel obtained from certain areas in the vicinity of -- among other places -- rivers and bridges, according to Minister of Economic Affairs Lin Hsin-yi (
Arriving later in the same area, Vice President Annette Lu (
Lu said that, as head of the presidential office's consultative committee on science and technology, she had been informed of Japanese technologies to recycle gravel to make household tiles. She said Taiwan should find ways to make good use of the gravel from the mudslides.
A soil and water conservation engineer, Debbie Weng (鄭麗瓊), told the Taipei Times that the government should start constructing what she called "detention pounds" at the confluence points of rivers prone to mudslides in order to capture gravel from the mudslides.
"The gravel can then be further filtered and recycled to become marketable as construction material," Weng said.
On Friday, Premier Chang Chun-hsiung (
But DPP legislative whip Lin Feng-hsi (
Echoing Lin's views, another DPP legislator, Tsai Huang-liang (
Tsai said that betel nut planting was just one of the causes of soil erosion and mudslides, and that he hoped that the Cabinet would conduct a further investigation before proposing measures that risked "sacrificing betel nut farmers' rights."
Lin said that the party's legislative caucus had scheduled a meeting with Chang and Council of Agriculture chairman Chen Chih-huang (
In addition, head of the Cabinet's typhoon reconstruction task force, Chen Chin-huang (
Head of the National Fire Administration, Chao Kang (
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