WRA Director-General Chen Shen-hsien (陳伸賢) said a few days ago that the flooding caused by Morakot was mainly due to the overflow of centrally administered rivers and not the rivers governed by local governments, which “proved the ‘Eight-year, NT$80 billion’ project was effective.”
Huang disagreed, saying that the flood-prevention construction projects were a failure.
As of last year, the total length of embankment along centrally administered rivers accounted for about 70 percent to 80 percent of the overall length of the sections of the rivers managed by the WRA.
Huang said that the funds appropriated to the WRA for managing rivers had been used to build dikes and channel water from one river watershed to another, a method often used in Taiwan to supply industrial water.
BLAME
One such current WRA project, building a diversion dam to channel water from the Laonong River in Kaohsiung County’s Jinhe Village (勤和村) to the Zengwun Reservoir (曾文水庫) in Tainan County, has been blamed by village council member Lu Chung-yi (呂仲珆) for the massive landslides in Kaohsiung County.
Ting Cheh-shyh (丁澈士), a professor of civil engineering at the National Pingtung University of Science and Technology, said that the extent of the recent flooding was both a natural disaster and also a human-made calamity.
“If the best strategy of returning land occupied by human beings to rivers cannot be used, the second best plan is to reforest bare areas, where ditches could be built to store floodwater or to build flood diversion works to mitigate floods. These two methods need to be included in flood prevention plans, aside from establishing dikes, which should be a last option,” Ting said.
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