The Nantou County Government’s failure to relocate hot spring resorts from landslide-prone Lushan (廬山) exposes tourists to catastrophic risk, the Control Yuan said on Friday.
The watchdog agency launched a probe into the county’s Fuxin Agritourism Farm in 2020 following a complaint from the National Audit Office that a program to shut and relocate at-risk businesses was hampered by delays, Control Yuan member Tien Chiu-chin (田秋堇) said.
The farm was meant to serve as a new location for hot spring resorts on Lushan, a scenic area revealed by a geological survey to be under severe and unmitigable landslide risk from a nearby peak that was in the process of shifting, she said.
Photo: Wang Yi-sung, Taipei Times
A slide could result in a loss of life and property damage on a scale comparable to the destruction of Kaohsiung’s Siaolin Village (小林) during Typhoon Morakot in 2009, she said.
Guidelines for the NT$3.3 billion (US$109.93 million) project stipulated that resorts were to cease operations on Lushan before being relocated to an agritourism project zone, she said.
When Control Yuan members toured Lushan in March, they found that 12 of the resorts in the scenic area were still operating, she said.
The Nantou government belatedly issued fines to five of the resorts after the inspection, she said, adding that local officials’ failure to act promptly appeared to be intentional.
While the county’s online visitor information contains warnings about possible Lushan landslides, the messaging is hard to find on the site and would likely be missed by most readers, she said.
“Should an incident like at Siaolin Village take place on Lushan, the casualties would be massive and unbearable,” she said, adding that the county’s negligence has endangered the lives of countless visitors.
The probe found significant failures in the county’s public safety management, and the need to address these problems has grown more urgent with the rising frequency of extreme climate events, Control Yuan member Shih Chin-fang (施錦芳) added.
Nantou Ccounty has not done much to better inform the public about the dangerous conditions on Lushan, which continues to attract large numbers of visitors, she said.
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