Rescuers on Monday recovered the body of a man who disappeared in a flash flood that swept away two tents near Lishi Creek (栗栖溪) in Nantou County’s Renai Township (仁愛) on Sunday.
Search-and-rescue personnel resumed looking for the 53-year-old man surnamed Lu (盧) at about 7am yesterday morning, after low visibility had forced them to halt the search on Sunday evening.
His body was recovered at about 8:30am.
Photo: Tung Chen-kuo, Taipei Times
Lu was one of four people from two Taichung families carried off early on Sunday as they slept in their tents.
The bodies of Lu’s 12-year-old daughter, a woman surnamed Chen (陳) and her six-year-old son surnamed Lai (賴) had been found on Sunday.
Lu’s wife, surnamed Hu (胡), told rescuers on Sunday that she had only survived because she was sleeping in their vehicle, while Chen’s husband was in his family’s tent, but managed to swim to safety.
State-run Taiwan Power Co (Taipower) yesterday said that its initial investigation showed that faulty insulation around communication cables likely caused a short-circuit that opened the No. 6 floodgate at Nantou Shuili Taguan Power Plant (大觀電廠), upstream of the Lishi Creek, at 4:12am on Sunday.
Taipower’s investigation found that a low water-level alarm went off at 4:21am, alerting an overnight operator, who used the emergency override system to start shutting the gate at 4:28am. The gate was fully closed at 4:43am.
“Nothing like this had ever happened before,” Taipower manager Chang Ting-shu (張廷抒) said by telephone. “That floodgate should not have opened up on its own.”
“It takes 15 minutes to fully open and close the floodgates,” Chang said.
Taipower estimates that about 208m3 of water rushes out of a floodgate every second that it is fully open.
The No. 6 floodgate opened for unexplained reasons again at 5:08am, but the operator discovered the incident “within one minute” and shut the gate again with minimal flooding, Taipower said.
Taipower notifies local officials before opening floodgates at its plants and makes public announcements through loudspeakers in the affected areas an hour before a gate is opened.
Camping is prohibited downstream from any hydroelectric plant in Taiwan, and there are warning signs along the rivers in those areas, Taipower said.
Television footage showed that there was a warning sign at the spot where the two families had camped.
“People are not supposed to enter a river bed area, but Taipower is still devastated by the magnitude of the accident,” Chang said. “If human error was a factor, we will of course bear the proper responsibility.”
The company is in the process of reviewing its control systems for flaws that could cause a similar accident, Chang said.
“If we find any, we will update the control systems to improve safety for all our dams,” he said.
The Tourism Bureau said that its initial investigation showed that the families had been camping in a restricted area.
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