EVERY AUGUST, some 30 scattered members of the Pang family would gather in one or another town in southern Taiwan to celebrate Father’s Day with a restaurant banquet for the head of their clan.
“This year, for some reason, they decided to have the dinner at home instead,” says Liu Shih- hsien.
The whole family is feared to have perished when a mudslide buried the village of Hsiao Lin last week. “None of them has made it back out,” says Mr Liu, the son of the chief of Jia Sian township, which includes the village.
More than 400 people are thought to have died in Hsiao Lin, which was located in a river valley. Just two houses remain above the mud and rubble. In all, Typhoon Morakot has killed about 500 people and caused some €8.5 billion in agricultural damage in Taiwan.
The aftermath has produced a political storm for president Ma Ying-jeou as criticism mounts over the government’s handling of the crisis. Over the weekend, he apologised for his government’s handling of the relief efforts. “We could have done a better job and we could have done it faster. I am sorry that we did not do our job better and faster,” he said.
Mr Liu, who runs a souvenir shop and restaurant in Jia Sian, selling products made of the area’s famous taro crop, said the official estimate of about 380 people dead in Hsiao Lin was “the most conservative number”.
Many have laid the blame for the tragedy in Hsiao Lin and other villages on the government for failing to give adequate warning when the typhoon hit and for years of neglect of the maintenance of slopes and infrastructure.
About 100m from Mr Liu’s store, the bridge linking Jia Sian to the highway sits collapsed into what is now a raging river.
“That actually fell in a typhoon last year,” Mr Liu says.
In Cishan, a town serving as the main rescue operations centre, Lu Guang complains that this was the second consecutive year that he had to be evacuated by helicopter after a typhoon destroyed roads into his village.
Mr Liu had moved into the mountains to be a primary school teacher just three years ago. “Each year the damage from the typhoons get worse than the last. Next year it will only be worse,” he says amid a drone of rescue helicopters taking off and landing.
Mr Liu says that while the government had sent engineers to reinforce mountain roads and bridges, those fortifications “just get washed away when the next typhoon comes”. He criticised the Ma government for initially declining foreign assistance. “Sure they have stepped up rescue efforts in the last two days, but so many are dead already,” he says.
Hsu Szu-chien, a political science professor at the Academia Sinica, says the biggest political damage came from insufficient leadership and “the president’s attitude, which is that of an elite which is unable to empathise with the urgency of the situation”.
Mr Liu paid homage to Hsiao Lin’s dead by spending Friday inside the Jia Sian household registration office taking photographs. Each showed the passport photograph of a villager, staring straight ahead and emotionless.
“I don’t know which of these people are alive or dead but this is the only record left of them now,” he says. “I took them so that their friends and relatives would at least have a photograph they can use at the funeral.” – (Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009)