The August 7 Flood

On 7 August 1959 a tropical depression came ashore at Budai in Chiayi. Drawn by Typhoon Ellen out at sea, it pulled in a powerful southwesterly airflow, and the rain fell from the seventh to the ninth. On the seventh alone, central and southern Taiwan received five hundred to a thousand millimetres, and fifteen stations recorded more than five hundred millimetres in a single day. The heaviest rain fell on Miaoli, Fengyuan, Fenyuan, the upper Wu River, Douliu and Alishan. Around Douliu, about 1,100 millimetres fell in half a day.

Overnight the rivers topped their banks. The railway bridge over the Dadu River was swept away, and between Hsinchu and Tainan there was damage along almost every kilometre of track. The railways were hit at 297 points and the roads at 476, and transport and telecommunications went down together.

Thirteen counties and cities were affected, home to thirty-eight percent of Taiwan's population. The worst hit were Miaoli, Taichung, Nantou, Changhua, Yunlin, Chiayi and Taichung City. Six hundred and sixty-seven people died, 408 went missing and 942 were injured. 27,466 houses were destroyed and 18,303 half destroyed. More than 136,000 hectares of farmland were damaged. Floodwater covered 1,365 square kilometres, and over three hundred thousand residents were affected.

The government mobilised large numbers of troops and, under the National Compulsory Labour Act, brought in about a million civilians to clear mud and help with relief. The homeless were put up in schools and in places such as the Taichung tobacco factory, more than three hundred thousand at the peak. The US military sent helicopters and an aircraft carrier to fly food and supplies into villages cut off by water, under the code name Operation Hunger.

Relief came with set rates: 1,000 dollars for each person killed, 700 for each person missing, 400 for each household whose house was destroyed. American aid sent flour and rice worth close to ten million New Taiwan dollars. The Bank of Taiwan issued twelve rounds of savings bonds with a top prize of 400,000 dollars.

Losses were estimated at 3.5 to 3.7 billion New Taiwan dollars, around eleven to twelve percent of the previous year's national income. The money had to come from taxes. The government introduced a flood reconstruction levy, a fifteen percent surcharge on business income tax and thirty percent on personal income tax. Entertainment and banquet taxes were raised, and land value tax and the land tax on farms carried a further forty percent surcharge. For several years, part of what people paid to see a film, host a banquet or slaughter a pig went to this flood.

After the flood the government issued an emergency decree and an outline for reconstruction, and in 1960 the Taiwan Provincial Water Conservancy Bureau set up a machinery engineering corps. A dedicated Disaster Prevention and Protection Act would not be promulgated until 2000. The flood was the deadliest natural disaster in postwar Taiwan until the 921 earthquake, and the first disaster of the postwar era that the whole island remembered together.

Overseas Chinese also raised money, for relief and for schools. Twenty-four elementary schools whose names began with the character qiao, for overseas Chinese, were founded in the disaster areas, and some village schools in central Taiwan still carry that character in their names today.