As Typhoon Nesat approached Taiwan on Saturday, it caused floods in Pingtung County. To make sure I could attend an international conference on Sunday, I traveled north from Tainan earlier than planned and stayed the night in New Taipei City.
With the typhoon landing on Saturday night, the wind grew.
I worried that there would be super-strong winds on Sunday and that it would be declared a holiday.
Local government leaders were doubtless worried that the typhoon would cause grievous damage and provoke public resentment, so, to avoid the traffic and safety problems that the storm might cause, all municipalities announced that work and classes would be canceled on Sunday.
However, when I got up early on Sunday morning, the sky was clear and sunny, with a mild breeze and no rain. At first I thought we must be in the eye of the storm, but after quite a long time the weather did not worsen and the sky was cloudless as far as the eye could see.
I checked for news about where Nesat was headed, only to find that it had already moved far away. Disappointingly, the international conference had already been called off.
If typhoon holidays were a bit more flexible, such disappointments could be avoided.
The money needed to invite international academics had already been spent, so if there were no worries about safety, it would make sense to go ahead and hold the event. However, the rules about typhoon holidays leave little room for maneuvering.
If the system remains unchanged, there will be no end to the problem of misjudged decisions about typhoon days off.
It would make sense for the economic functioning of society to improve the decisionmaking mechanism for typhoon holidays.
When local government leaders announce a day off because of a typhoon, they could add a supplementary notice saying, for example, that if there is no wind and rain at 7am the next morning and if people are not in danger, then different government departments can decide what to do. This would prevent mistaken or misjudged decisions about typhoon holidays.
This is by no means the first time that a misjudged decision has been made about a typhoon holiday. In the past, people have tended to blame inaccurate weather forecasts, in some cases leaving officials at the Central Weather Bureau with no option but to tender their resignations.
A more reasonable explanation would be that the weather is always changing, so that while some aspects of it can be predicted, others cannot easily be forecast with 100 percent accuracy. That is why atmospheric sciences speak of a “butterfly effect”: The idea that a butterfly’s wings disturbing the air in Beijing can affect the weather in New York.
One example of this unpredictability took place in southern Taiwan a few years ago when heavy rainfall set in early one morning, but local government leaders had not made a timely announcement that work and classes would be canceled.
The officials were immediately taken to task on Internet forums by people saying that the decision to announce a typhoon holiday had been made too late for them to act accordingly. Following that experience, decisionmaking on typhoon holidays has become increasingly “efficient.”
If announcements are made earlier, there are likely to be more instances of misjudged typhoon holidays. This is not a normal state of affairs, because besides the weather being difficult to predict 100 percent accurately, geographical factors make it even harder to make across-the-board decisions.
For example New Taipei City is far from Tainan, Kaohsiung and Pingtung County, so the weather in these places can be different, making misjudgements even more likely.
Perhaps the public expects and depends on the government, including local leaders, to decide typhoon holidays as early and quickly as possible. This abnormal “public opinion phenomenon” is seen as normal in Taiwan, but this characteristic of our political culture is unique in the international community. For example, in the US and Japan — which are advanced countries — they only have rules for canceling lessons to ensure schoolchildren’s safety, not for canceling work.
An ideal system for making decisions about typhoon holidays should be flexible. It should allow individuals, departments and businesses to make their own decisions about whether to cancel work, depending on their particular weather conditions, rather than having local governments shoulder all the responsibility.
Local leaders are not weather experts, so more flexible systems for deciding typhoon holidays are surely the right way to go.
Yang Yung-nane is a professor in the Department of Political Science and Graduate Institute of Political Economy at National Cheng Kung University.
Translated by Julian Clegg
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