The September 21 earthquake caused serious loss of life and property, but it also aroused a spirit of compassion that many Taiwanese thought was a thing of the past. Now the government and the people at large must ponder painful lessons about the island's ability to handle disasters of every kind.
According to Ignazio Silone, one of the greatest novelists Italy has produced this century, "an earthquake promises what the law promises but does not in practice maintain--the equality of all men." Lee Shu-chin and her husband learned the truth of that on the morning of September 21, 1999, when a major tremor struck Taiwan. They and thousands like them now recognize what happened at 1:47 A.M. that day for what it was: a leveler without parallel.
Chungliao township, which is where the Lees used to live, was just like any other small rural town in central Taiwan. Most of the 12,000 residents farmed the land or worked in small factories. Life was simple and straightforward, until the earthquake destroyed the only world these easygoing country people had ever known. The Lees were lucky: they jumped from a second-floor window of their home moments before it collapsed. Their neighbor, a plumber, was not so fortunate. He managed to get out with one of his three children before going back inside to rescue the other two and his wife. He never made it. The house tumbled, killing all four of them when they were just one step away from safety.
Once the stories began to circulate, it was as if a pebble had been flung into a pool. Ripples spread outwards quickly, magnifying the tragedy. Two brothers who lived across the street from the Lees were buried under tons of rubble and later burned to ashes in a fire caused by escaping gas. Daylight revealed that more than a hundred residents of Chungliao had perished, but the township was far from alone in the melancholy task of counting the victims. The earthquake, registering 7.3 on the Richter scale, smashed thousands of houses and caused more than 10,000 casualties across the island.
The epicenter was located beneath Chichi, a small town in Nantou County, central Taiwan, and it was that area which suffered the worst damage. In nearby Puli, a pleasantly scenic little place popular with retirees, more than a hundred people were killed and all the essential emergency systems went down: The fire and police stations, hospitals, and township office were either demolished or put out of action. More than two hundred people died in Tungshih, in neighboring Taichung County; their bodies lay outside for several days awaiting the arrival of refrigeration equipment and coffins. Twenty-nine of the thirty-seven members in the Chien family who lived in Tsaoling, Yunlin County, were buried under mud and rock. The list of dead, injured, and missing seemed endless.
The northern part of the island was not immune. A twelve-story complex in Taipei collapsed, killing seventy people. Another building went down in Taipei County, claiming some forty victims. Most parts of the island had to do without power and telecommunications for hours at best and days at worst, rendering it impossible to put a final figure on the number of casualties until a couple of weeks had passed. Statistics released by the National Fire Administration three weeks after the quake show that it caused 2,333 deaths (over 2,000 of them in the counties of Taichung and Nantou), injured more than 8,700 people, and left approximately eighty victims either missing or known to be buried in rubble.
From an economic point of view, the agricultural sector, numerous small- and medium-sized enterprises, and the tourist industry were the biggest losers. Agricultural losses in Taichung and Nantou Counties reached NT$2.36 billion (US$73.8 million), while the 400 or so factories in Nantou's Nankang Industrial Zone between them lost about NT$1 billion (US$31.2 million). It is difficult for people in the tourist industry to calculate their losses, with so many facilities and access roads destroyed. The central cross-island highway, one of the most popular scenic routes in a spectacularly scenic island, will take between three and five years to repair.
One reason why so many people died was that buildings collapsed when they should have stayed upright. Hsiao Chiang -pi, director-general of the Ministry of the Interior's Architecture and Building Research Institute, points out that any structure built after 1982 must be able to survive earthquakes registering six on the Richter scale in order to comply with the island's building code. "I'm not saying there wouldn't be as much as a crack in the wall [if they meet the standard]," he explains. "But the buildings wouldn't collapse--not immediately, anyway--and occupants would at least have a chance of survival."
Nevertheless, some of the buildings that collapsed had been in existence for only three or four years, and some were located in areas where the quake measured just four or five on the Richter scale. When people came to examine the ruins of their homes, they discovered things that should not have been there--cooking-oil cans, for example. Hsiao explains that cans are occasionally used as space fillers, or inside purely decorative pillars, but the materials used for such purposes should be lightweight enough not to add to the stress on the building. "Cans have often been used in the decorative parts of buildings, but no construction company would use them in the main structure," Hsiao maintains. "I simply don't believe anyone in Taiwan could be so heartless."
But although there can be no doubt about the meaning of the relevant sections of the building code, Hsiao admits that local governments typically have neither the manpower nor the time to examine every building during the course of its construction. And if physicians bury their mistakes, builders cover theirs in plaster. As a result, it is easy enough for a contractor to save money by sacrificing quality, adding more water to the cement, or making do with inferior rebars inside beams and pillars, all without any real prospect of being caught.
Firefighters, private-sector rescue groups from Taiwan and abroad, and members of the armed forces were faced with the unenviable task of picking through the ruins of jerrybuilt high-rises soon after the quake struck. Although their operations were sometimes stalled by aftershocks and by the lack of a proper command and coordination system, there was some good news, at least in the first few days. A forty-five-year-old woman in Yuanlin, Changhua County, survived for a grueling fifty hours in the ruins of her home; and two brothers were found alive after 130 hours in the rubble of their Taipei home. (See interview on page 44.) Other stories were less happy: One couple survived the collapse of their twelve-story apartment building in Fengyuan, Taichung County, although tragically their two children were killed in the room next to theirs.
Many of the rescue teams that came from overseas won high praise for their efforts. But as residents around the island switched on their TV sets and watched these professionals sifting through the rubble, they began to ask themselves questions: Why doesn't Taiwan have equipment that can register body heat or a nearby heartbeat; why can't Taiwan train a professional rescue team; why doesn't the government have a blueprint for dealing with major disasters? But all the questions really boiled down to just one: Why isn't Taiwan better prepared?
"I'd be lying if I told you that the government was fully prepared to deal with such a major natural disaster," Vice President Lien Chan said in response to a reporter's question two weeks after the quake. But Taiwan is located on the junction of two vast tectonic plates, the Eurasian Plate and the Philippine Sea Plate, with more than fifty fault lines fileting the island and a couple-dozen quakes striking every day (although most of them can only be detected by monitoring instruments). It seems to follow that there are no excuses: Taiwan knew what was coming.
There were certainly opportunities to prepare. After the 1995 Kobe earthquake in Japan, the Taiwan Provincial Govern ment (TPG) began to draft an emergency plan for dealing with major natural crises, a plan that would have involved setting up a permanent task force. But then a decision was made to downsize the TPG, and the plan was left in limbo. Chang Heng, the ER director of a Taipei hospital, recalled during a seminar organized by the Chinese-language Min Sheng Daily that the central government had also set up a special rescue team after the Kobe earthquake, but its members were gradually promoted or transferred to other agencies, and no replacements were recruited. "I didn't see a single familiar face in this rescue opera tion," says Chang, who was one of the people responsible for training the original team. "I wish the government would learn that we should always have such a team ready, instead of constantly worrying about how to pay for it."
In some respects, Taiwan has been trying to make up for its lack of professionalism and readiness with warm-hearted enthusiasm. Shortly after the quake, emergency supplies poured into the disaster area. Within hours, free bottled water and hot meals were available almost everywhere. People joked that they used to wander up and down the line of food tents, estimating how many were waiting to be fed at each and using the numbers as a yardstick to judge how good the food was. Nor did the island's generosity restrict itself to comestibles: around-the-clock deliveries of daily necessities, medicine, refrig eration equipment, sleeping bags, and tents became a common sight in many towns and villages. And then, finally, the coffins started to arrive.
Assorted religious groups and military personnel bore the brunt of the rescue effort during the first twenty-four hours. Both sets of rescuers came equipped with the ability to work independently under a clear chain of command. Other relief workers, including lawyers, doctors, nurses, architects, and engineers arrived a bit later, and such unofficial groupings some times got into difficulty. One doctor attached to a team from Taipei's National Taiwan University Hospital said during a TV interview that they had driven around various townships in central Taiwan for a whole day without finding an opportunity to provide professional assistance, so in the end they returned to Taipei without helping anyone.
"Those people were offering what we needed most urgently, but they couldn't reach us because they didn't know the way in," says Wang Tze-hua, a Puli resident. "The township officials had enough problems of their own , so no one was there to organize the relief groups and tell them where to go." Wang and several other local people eventually took it upon them selves to make contact with the relief workers, guiding them to where they were most needed and taking care of their food and accommodation.
Relief supplies from every part of the island and voluntary workers from all walks of life came together to restore a lot of people's faith in Taiwanese human nature. Still, there is a dark side. A relief worker in Puli told how he saw someone stash twenty cases of mineral water in his house and then go back for more. Fei Kuang-ming, director of medical affairs at the Puli Veterans Hospital, laments that thousands of doses of medicine sent there were either just on their expiry dates or no longer prescribed. "We appreciate the help," he says dryly. "We prefer to believe it was just a coincidence."
There have also been reports of merchants trying to sell food and bottled water at more than twenty times the usual price, and buses full of ghoulish disaster-sightseers. In areas where the police were overstretched, either because officers had fallen victim to the quake or because they were tied up directing the unprecedented traffic flows, there were reports of robberies and thefts. One group of TPG employees camped in front of their ruined offices, guarding their remaining equipment, because some of their computers had already been stolen before the staff showed up after the quake.
On September 25, ROC President Lee Teng-hui issued an emergency decree. This measure, effective for six months, overrides certain existing laws and simplifies the administrative procedures involved in building temporary shelters, carrying out works of repair or reconstruction, and obtaining copies of lost documents and certificates. The decree also allows the government to raise funds by issuing bonds beyond the existing cap of 15 percent of approved public spending, and to mobilize the military for urgent relief and rebuilding work. The legislature is involved in a messy debate about whether Cabinet-drafted guidelines on the working of the decree require legislative approval, but there has been remarkably little protest about involving the military. Two opinion polls respectively conducted by Academia Sinica and the Chinese Institute of Public Opinion showed that the populace regarded the armed forces as more effective and efficient at rescue and recon struction than other government agencies.
The Cabinet quickly moved to set up a reconstruction committee, with Vice President Lien Chan as its convener and Premier Vincent Siew as chairman. The committee's coordination office is in Chunghsing Village, seat of the TPG, and every Cabinet-level agency has at least two ranking officials stationed there to handle post-quake affairs, ranging through the distribution of relief funds, repair of buildings, educational assistance, medical services, and vocational training programs. A non-governmental organization headed by Academia Sinica President Lee Yuan-tseh has also been set up to review the ongoing process of reconstruction and monitor the distribution of financial donations. Unlike the government's committee, however, the alliance will not actually handle money. Its job is to ensure that relief efforts are properly coordinated and that funds are not misappropriated or misdirected.
Finding temporary shelter for Taiwan's new population of homeless people is the most urgent task at present. Most of them started out either living in tents or occupying spartan accommodation in various military camps. Within a few days, however, many of them had moved to the homes of friends or relatives, although some people were still too nervous to leave what they regarded as the comparative safety of open spaces. A typical example is one eighty-year-old woman in Chungliao, who two weeks after the quake could be found sitting in front of her tent, watching her grandchildren play in a yard that was mostly occupied by other tents and items saved from her partially collapsed home. She said that her sons wanted her to move in with them in Taichung, at least for a while, but she did not plan to go. She had lived in the countryside all her life, and she knew that she would never be able to feel comfortable in a city.
The fact is that few inhabitants of the disaster area care to spend too much time indoors these days, even if their houses are declared safe. Residents on re-entering their homes for the first time typically clear an exit route before doing anything else--just in case. "When you look around your hometown and see so many ruined buildings, you realize there's no such thing as a 'safe' house," says Puli resident Chen Fang-tze. "Engineers give you an opinion based on their professional knowledge, but would you bet your life on that?"
The government has so far started work on 5,000 shelter-housing units, and the private sector is building more. The first forty units were completed and occupied by mid-October. Homeless people who do not wish to take advantage of these temporary houses can claim a monthly NT$3,000 (US$93.75) per-person rent allowance from the government while they wait for civil engineers to check and classify their buildings into one of three categories: safe; not in immediate danger of collapse; or in urgent need of demolition or structural repair.
Owners of damaged buildings are eligible for grants, but these have become the subject of controversy. Owners of houses that were demolished by the quake are entitled to NT$200,000 (US$6,250), while owners of partially destroyed dwellings receive half that amount. "I know what 'demolished' means, but please explain the meaning of 'partially de stroyed,' and why does it merit only half the money?" asks one elderly resident as he shows visitors his seriously damaged but nevertheless upright two-story residence in Chungliao. "As I see it, 'partially destroyed' is actually worse than 'demolished,' because no one's brave enough to live in such a house, and all the owner can do is pay to have it torn down. But in the case of demolished buildings, the quake's already done most of the work."
Things become even more complicated when a building contains more than one dwelling unit, since classification for compensation purposes is done on a household-by-household basis. Some occupants want to have their properties given a "demolished" label so that they can buy a house elsewhere, while others prefer a "partially collapsed" designation, which allows them to keep the property and move back into it once repairs have been completed. Sometimes the results defy common sense. The first two floors of a twelve-story complex in Minchien township, Nantou County, were put into the demolished category, while the ten upper floors were held to be partially collapsed.
Not only housing was affected. The quake destroyed or rendered unusable most of the schools in the worst-affected areas, leaving thousands of students without anywhere to study. While temporary classrooms are being built, some schools have been holding classes in bicycle sheds. National Chi-Nan University in Puli moved all its faculties and students to classrooms made available by National Taiwan University in Taipei. More than 800 primary students from central Taiwan are temporarily attending schools in Taipei, staying with volunteer host families.
Figures supplied by the Directorate General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics show that in Taichung and Nantou Counties, only around 10 percent of the relief funds allocated to the owners of partially collapsed buildings, and 30 percent in the case of demolished buildings, had actually been released by mid-October, the deadline set by Premier Vincent Siew for local governments to complete the distribution of relief funds. "The government wanted the victims to have the money sooner so they could start rebuilding at the earliest opportunity, but apparently there have been problems," says Chiang Pin -kung, chairman of the Council for Economic Planning and Development and a deputy executive director of the government reconstruction committee. "Our current mechanisms enable us to deal with smaller crises, but not a major disaster like this."
At least one very important lesson has been learned: the government has ordered a new survey of the island's fault lines and is drafting a law that will ban residential development anywhere in their vicinity. And since a large number of townships and villages in central Taiwan will have to be rebuilt from the ground up, urban planners are urging the government to take the opportunity to draft complete urban redevelopment plans.
Perhaps even more unsettling than the extent of the physical damage is the psychological dimension of the tragedy. Some survivors have already started to display the symptoms of post-disaster trauma: hysteria, nervousness, insomnia, night mares, and other even more serious problems. Experience teaches that, if not properly treated, these traumas can kill: six months after the Kobe earthquake, twenty-five survivors had committed suicide. The signs are already apparent in Taiwan. A few days after the September 21 quake, a young woman doused herself in gasoline and set fire to it because she blamed herself for not being able to save her mother. The Department of Health has been urging victims, relief workers, and even reporters to seek professional assistance. Psychiatrists from all over the island have set up emergency treatment centers in the disaster area. The worrisome thing is that so few people visit them. In Puli, it seems, most of the inhabitants chose to attend "ceremonies to ward off evil" conducted by Taoist priests.
Four weeks after the quake, most of the search-and-rescue operations in Puli have been called off, the dead have been buried or cremated, and the survivors still wait in line to apply for temporary IDs or government handouts. A few flower growers have already started shipping their produce again, but most of the reconstruction work is still in its early stages. Heavy machinery is busy tearing down unstable structures, and soldiers and voluntary workers continue to erect temporary homes.
The government says that reconstruction could take as long as five years, and it may well be that all the houses, roads, and bridges can be rebuilt within that time. But what of the human lives lost--lives that might, perhaps, have been saved had the government and the public been better prepared? For so many years, an earthquake meant little to the inhabitants of Taiwan except a few broken vases or a crack in the wall. Those days of innocence are gone forever. Like the island's 2,333 lost souls, they will not be coming back.