Morakot and the Village of Xiaolin

Typhoon Morakot made landfall in Hualien on August 7, 2009. Its winds were not exceptional; it moved very slowly, and it emptied itself onto the mountains of southern Taiwan. The Alishan station recorded more than three thousand millimeters over three days, close to a full year's rainfall there. On August 8 the rainfall maps for Pingtung, Kaohsiung and Chiayi went past their upper bounds.

Before dawn on August 9 the slope of Xiandu Mountain came down behind Xiaolin village, in Jiaxian. The debris buried the settlement whole; 474 people died, and the rescue teams who arrived found no landform left to begin a search from. The Jinshuai Hotel beside the Zhiben River collapsed in the same days, the whole building leaning into the water live on television. That footage became the cover image of the disaster, and there were no cameras where the people actually died. The final count was 681 dead and 18 missing, with 19.5 billion NT dollars in agricultural and fishery losses.

The rescue problem was not the one from 1999. That time the roads had broken; this time whole sections of mountain road had gone along with the mountain. Bridge piers were washed out, access routes were recorded as absent rather than damaged, and everything had to move by helicopter. On August 11 a National Airborne Service Corps helicopter crashed in the mountains of Wutai, Pingtung, killing its three crew.

The government's response became the second part of the disaster. On August 12 the Ministry of Foreign Affairs cabled missions abroad asking foreign governments to hold off on rescue teams and donations; the cable surfaced two days later and the minister apologized in public. The Executive Yuan did not issue an emergency decree as it had in 1999, working instead through the Morakot Post-Disaster Reconstruction Special Act, promulgated on August 28, with a reconstruction budget of 120 billion NT dollars. On September 7, Premier Liu Chao-shiuan announced the resignation of his cabinet.

Permanent housing was the center of the reconstruction policy. Tzu Chi built the Great Love community at Shanlin; Rinari, on the Majia farm in Pingtung, took in three communities — Kucapungane, Paridrayan and Makazayazaya. The houses went up quickly, usually occupied within a year, a speed rarely seen in post-disaster reconstruction anywhere. The condition of occupancy was that the original settlements were designated special zones and could not be lived in again, and the fields, hunting grounds and ancestral sites on the mountain did not move down with the houses. There are people who have lived in permanent housing for ten years and still go back up every year to plant a plot.

After Morakot, Taiwan rewrote its debris-flow warnings and its rules on compulsory evacuation, and from 2010 clearing a village before heavy rain became routine. That is what the disaster bought. One other thing was never written into any regulation: a memorial park stands on the site of Xiaolin, and the survivors were resettled in three separate places, where they each built a village of their own.