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Updated Tuesday, September 1, 2009 9:15 am TWN, The China Post news staff

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We must abandon living in dangerous areas

Many have laid the blame for the hundreds of deaths on Taiwan's serious problems with soil conservation. The conventional wisdom is that we plant far too many tea farms and betel nut trees on slippery mountain slopes. Mountain villages sit at the bottom of these slopes and whenever the topsoil gets loose and rains come, the inevitable result is deadly mudslides.

But the chair of Department of Soil and Water Conservation at National Chung Hsing University, Professor Chen Su-chin, says that in his opinion, soil wasn't the culprit. Professor Chen argues that the amount of rain from Morakot was truly “extraordinary.”

Professor Chen further believes that people's ignorance of the dangers that mudslides pose also contributed to the problem. He and his colleagues make one simple recommendation for the future: Don't rebuild in areas that are prone to mudslides.

Unfortunately, we probably won't listen to this wisdom. Humans have fought nature for centuries, and we usually lose — but that hasn't stopped us from trying. Many residents of dangerous areas in Taiwan have deep ancestral connections to their land and relocating them would probably have to be done by force, something any government would prefer to avoid.

Chuck Doswell writes that after Katrina, the city of New Orleans faced one of two difficult choices. The first would be to completely abandon the city, accepting that the original location was simply too susceptible to disaster, or choice two: spend billions of dollars on a complicated system that could prevent floods.

“In either of these,” Doswell contends, “the costs would have been very high — tens of billions of dollars, at the least. Since no one chose to pay the price for either option, we're now paying the price for the flood disaster that had become inevitable. It's like the old commercial — 'Pay me now, or pay me later' — but pay we will.”

Taiwan needs to find the will to insist that dangerous areas be abandoned. It's not a popular political position and any politician espousing it can expect a backlash, but it's the right thing to do for the future. If we find the backbone to mandate change, the deaths of hundreds of our fellow citizens will not be in vain.

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