Experts urged the government yesterday to prohibit people from living in areas at risk of mudslides.
Hung Hung-chih (洪鴻智), a professor at National Taipei University’s Department of Real Estate and Built Environment, said that because the typhoon season is not yet over, people who have been evacuated from mountainous areas in the wake of Typhoon Morakot should be banned from returning to their homes because of the danger of further mudslides.
Morakot, which battered the island on Aug. 7 and Aug. 8, dumped about 2,500mm of rain — more than a year’s rainfall — on southern Taiwan, triggering the most serious flooding and mudslides in five decades.
PHOTO: WANG YI-SUNG,TAIPEI TIMES
Furthermore, Hung said the government’s efforts to seek foreign aid for its search and rescue operation came too late.
“The best window of opportunity to find survivors is within 72 hours of a disaster,” he told the Central News Agency.
The government has come under increasing fire for rejecting foreign aid in the immediate aftermath of the disaster and for waiting several days before flip-flopping on its decision.
Taiwan has amassed a great deal of experience in relief operations since the 921 Earthquake on Sept. 21, 1999, Hung said, adding that unfortunately, this experience has not been translated into standard operating procedures that could help the country improve its disaster relief performance.
“As a result, the government has failed to deal with the present tragedy effectively,” he said.
The top priority now is to accommodate those people whose settlements have been destroyed by mudslides.
Meanwhile, Hsu Shi-jung (徐世榮), a professor at National Chengchi University’s Department of Land Economics, alerted the government to the many barrier lakes formed in valleys by mudslides.
“They could burst under the weight of the water they are holding back, leading to more flooding,” he said.
Both Hung and Hsu warned the government against letting the evacuees return to their mudslide-destroyed settlements, at least during the next three months, when the island is still vulnerable to typhoons.
It will take five years for the terrain in the devastated areas to solidify and only then should reconstruction be considered, the experts said.
They suggested that the government relocate residents of the areas to safe places and help them resettle by finding them jobs so that they do not have to move back into their dangerous mountain settlements.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater