Researchers and legislators on Thursday urged the government to launch a nationwide geological survey to identify those areas most prone to deep-seated landslides and to take corresponding action to prevent further disasters.
At a press conference hosted by Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Tien Chiu-chin (田秋堇), Tseng Shui-ping (鄭水萍), a professor of social development at National Pingtung University, showed clips of a documentary produced by Japanese national TV channel NHK that explored the reasons why Kaohsiung County’s Siaolin Village (小林) was destroyed when Typhoon Morakot hit in August last year.
Tseng, who assisted the production team during the making of the documentary, said Taiwan has experience in handling shallow landslides, such as mudslides. What happened in Siaolin, however, was a deep-seated landslide, he said.
“The Japanese experts found that the collapse began at a site in the mountain that is 1 kilometer long, 500 meters wide and 84 meters deep, which is about the height of a 20-story building,” Tseng said, adding that the documentary also made use of a three-dimensional animation to illustrate how the landslide occurred.
Tseng said Japanese experts were very interested in studying Siaolin because a series of similar disasters have occurred in Japan since the 1990s, with torrential rain causing deep-seated landslides.
“They spent six months determining all potential locations,” Tseng said. “We on the other hand seem to have done nothing, we didn’t even interview survivors who witnessed the disaster as it unfolded.”
Tien added that Taiwan needs to quickly pass a geology act (地質法) to cope with the challenges presented by deep-seated landslides.
In related news, the Ministry of Economic Affairs reported that one year after Morakot, the volume of silt dredged from waterways by the Water Resources Agency is estimated to be 42 times the height of Taipei 101.
The demand for sandstone nationwide averages 6 million meters per year, Minister of Economic Affairs Shih Yen-shiang (施顏祥) said, adding that Morakot had washed away 120 million meters of sandstone — about a 20-year supply.
As of Sunday, the build-up of silt from the typhoon had been significantly reduced and irrigation ditches expanded to four times their usual size as a result of the dredging operation, Shih said.
ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY CNA
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:
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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