Typhoon Update

In a post below, I talked about the damage from Typhoon Morakot in Taiwan. I will mention again because of the seriousness of the topic. It is THE story now in Taiwan. In fact, more and more stories about the typhoon are emerging.

The shocker to me was the amount of rain in some areas. Between August 7-9 on A-li Mountain there was 2.77 meters (over 9 feet) of rain! Think about that. 9 feet in a few days. For me, that amount of rain is beyond imagination for such a short period--and I'm from Oregon.

This is even worse for a few reasons. There are mountains that run along the spine of Taiwan and when there is a lot of rain there is always the potential for landslides. Combine this with the amount of rain in already landslide prone areas and there was disaster. Now I think the government should have seen this coming--they didn't. To be fair, even if they did many of the hardest hit areas were already outside the reach of most communication so an evacuation would have been very hard. Still, the order should have been issued.

One of the many problems now is that due to amount of rain and sheer volume of mud a large number of roads and bridges are simply gone--just ripped away. So this severely hampers rescue efforts in these remote areas.

Many of the worst hit areas, in case you cannot already tell, are very poor. There are a lot of Taiwanese aborigines in these rural areas. The aborigines tend to be the poorest and least well off of all Taiwanese. This has been exacerbated by the slow government response.

In many, ways this is reminiscent of Hurricane Katrina in the US in that despite a predicted storm there was still an unorganized and (at-first) haphazard government response. When the full extent of the damage began to come to light the government then rushed more troops to the area and the president visited the disaster area and tried to skirt taking responsibility for all the short-comings. After initially turning down foreign aid it was instead requested. Both are true of Katrina and Morakot. We shall see if the political fallout is the same here in Taiwan.

Also realize when you read stories about storm that Taiwan is a modern and developed nation. It is a first world country. But the storm sent many areas back to dark ages.

I personally do not want to even imagine the plight of many down there. I don't know what I would do in Taipei (northern Taiwan) without AC, but the south (where the real damage is) is much much hotter and more humid than Taipei. So not having AC, much less a house would not be fun.

Check out some links about Morakot:

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2009/08/17/2003451343
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8197012.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8205447.stm
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/08/typhoon_morakot.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8197012.stm