Heavy rains from Super Typhoon Ragasa on Sept. 23 caused a barrier lake in Hualien County’s Mataian River (馬太鞍溪) to burst, with the mud from the floodwaters piling up like mountains and spreading over several kilometers. The proper management of this mud is a critical issue.
The mud that surged out of the barrier lake and was cleared from the river channel and surrounding areas came from landslides of rocks and soil from the mountains. Taiwan’s eastern region has many cement factories, because it is difficult to extract the raw materials needed for cement production in the west, making Yilan and Hualien counties sources of material. Mining requires permits from local governments that regulate mining duration, area and extraction volume.
Ragasa washed down tens of millions of tonnes of debris, which could supply cement factories with raw materials for several years.
This is similar to what happened after Typhoon Morakot in 2009, when a massive amount of sand and gravel washed into Pingtung County’s Donggang (東港) and Laonong (荖濃) river basins. Afterward, many sand and gravel quarries were established in the Pingtung and Greater Kaohsiung areas, becoming major sources of construction materials for central and southern Taiwan.
The government should implement the following measures to manage the mud and debris from the barrier lake.
First, suitable locations should be selected as centralized storage sites for soil and rock resources, then equipped with facilities such as fences and drainage systems. This would not only prevent materials from being washed back into roads or rivers and cause secondary pollution, but also allow for the proper management and reuse of these resource materials. Unauthorized people should not use these materials without permission.
Second, qualified sand and gravel operators should be selected to manage the sites. After removing waste, the soil and rock should be properly classified and sifted before being sold at public auction.
Local cement factories with mining permits should be encouraged to purchase and use these materials. Cement and concrete production should also prioritize using these disaster-created soil and rock, and limit the volume of new extraction. Cement factories and construction materials companies could also label their products as made from post-disaster resources, thereby aligning with environmental, social and governance principles, and contributing to the development of environmental sustainability.
Last, the government should prioritize using building materials produced from these post-disaster resources during public construction projects. This could be a “heavenly compensation” in the aftermath of a natural disaster.
Chen Wen-ching works in environmental services.
Translated by Kyra Gustavsen
Chinese agents often target Taiwanese officials who are motivated by financial gain rather than ideology, while people who are found guilty of spying face lenient punishments in Taiwan, a researcher said on Tuesday. While the law says that foreign agents can be sentenced to death, people who are convicted of spying for Beijing often serve less than nine months in prison because Taiwan does not formally recognize China as a foreign nation, Institute for National Defense and Security Research fellow Su Tzu-yun (蘇紫雲) said. Many officials and military personnel sell information to China believing it to be of little value, unaware that
Before 1945, the most widely spoken language in Taiwan was Tai-gi (also known as Taiwanese, Taiwanese Hokkien or Hoklo). However, due to almost a century of language repression policies, many Taiwanese believe that Tai-gi is at risk of disappearing. To understand this crisis, I interviewed academics and activists about Taiwan’s history of language repression, the major challenges of revitalizing Tai-gi and their policy recommendations. Although Taiwanese were pressured to speak Japanese when Taiwan became a Japanese colony in 1895, most managed to keep their heritage languages alive in their homes. However, starting in 1949, when the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) enacted martial law
“Si ambulat loquitur tetrissitatque sicut anas, anas est” is, in customary international law, the three-part test of anatine ambulation, articulation and tetrissitation. And it is essential to Taiwan’s existence. Apocryphally, it can be traced as far back as Suetonius (蘇埃托尼烏斯) in late first-century Rome. Alas, Suetonius was only talking about ducks (anas). But this self-evident principle was codified as a four-part test at the Montevideo Convention in 1934, to which the United States is a party. Article One: “The state as a person of international law should possess the following qualifications: a) a permanent population; b) a defined territory; c) government;
The central bank and the US Department of the Treasury on Friday issued a joint statement that both sides agreed to avoid currency manipulation and the use of exchange rates to gain a competitive advantage, and would only intervene in foreign-exchange markets to combat excess volatility and disorderly movements. The central bank also agreed to disclose its foreign-exchange intervention amounts quarterly rather than every six months, starting from next month. It emphasized that the joint statement is unrelated to tariff negotiations between Taipei and Washington, and that the US never requested the appreciation of the New Taiwan dollar during the
RSS