Flashback Friday: 8/8/2009 Typhoon Morakot

Local park after Typhoon Morakot

As this year's Typhoon season safely draws to a safe close, I thought it would be appropriate to do a flashback to one of Taiwan's largest Typhoons in recent history.  In 2009, Typhoon Morakot ripped through South East Asia and hit the Philippines and Taiwan especially hard.  Here in Taiwan, 461 people were left dead and nearly another 200 were reported missing.  The most hard-hit areas were mountain villages;  here, the rains relentlessly pounded Taiwan's eroded mountainsides and caused mudslides that virtually erased several aboriginal villages and left many without homes.

Although the sheer force of this typhoon could not have been helped, the government of Taiwan faced severe critcism over the slow response to the typhoon and the destruction it caused.  Many people worried that the government was particularly slow because aboriginal villages were involved and were not considered a priority.  For whatever motivation, only about 2,000 members of the national guard were deployed to help landslide victims and remove the trapped residents still stuck under debris.  Later on, about 46,000 troops were deployed to rescue the thousands of people left stranded or stuck in affected areas.

For our part, our courtyard filled up with water and began to flow into the apartment buildings in our complex, filling up the lobby and descending down the stairs into the parking garage below.  A call went out on the PA system for the buildings, asking all abled bodied people to come downstairs to help baracade the doors.  Jenny and I helped by participating in a sweep up (essentially sweeping water out the door after clearing the courtyard's drains) and sand-bagging the doors to prevent water from continuing to flow in.

Although this kind of typhoon doesn't hit often, they are becoming a much more frequent occurrence in Taiwan as in other places, like the Philippines.  These storms remind us that no matter how hard we try, we cannot fight against nature and win; we need to work with nature if we want our lives, buildings, and societies to remain in tact.