Cut Off Heavy Chains, Use New Thinking to Restart Flood Control Program

  Cut Off Heavy Chains, Use New Thinking to Restart Flood Control Program

China Times Editorial (Taipei, Taiwan)

August 26, 2018

 Translation of an Excerpt

Last week, central and southern Taiwan were hit by extremely torrential rains, and 9 cities and counties announced the closure of offices and schools. Looking ahead, similar extremely heavy rains and torrential rains may become the norm. For this reason, we recommend that the government immediately suspend the implementation of all budgets related to flood prevention and control, reviewing anew various plans, and examining all programs using new thinking and new standards to push for a new flood control program.

This time the torrential rains brought serious damages; people suffered losses in lives and properties. Many people one after another accused the government’s "8-year, NT$116 billion" flood control program initiated in 2006 and the "6-year, NT$66 billion” valley control program initiated in 2016 of failing completely. In the past several decades, the government has injected hundreds of billions of dollars in flood prevention and control; the results have still been failures in preventing flooding.

At the Bonn Conference held last year, "German Monitoring," an international organization, made public a "Climate Risk Indicators Report." This report was based on the number of deaths and property losses caused by typhoons, torrential rains, droughts and other extreme climate changes, assessing the risks to various countries around the world; Taiwan was ranked as high as seventh.

In view of the past and present flood control programs, without exception, they were all made based on old thinking and old standards. For this reason, we recommend that the government first completely suspend all programs for flood prevention and control, and then push forward after reviewing anew with amendments. With regard to the direction of revision, the first point is to raise the design standards for all engineering of flood prevention and control because faced with the arrival of an era of extreme climate becoming the new normal, the past standards obviously could not be applicable. Secondly, and also most important and fundamental, is to abandon the past thinking in flood prevention and control that "engineering is supreme," and use new thinking to ponder the future.

Faced with the extreme climate change in the future, we should focus on the holistic urban program, and even an area program, from the flood water retention basins of rivers to the flood water retention ponds in urban areas, and then resetting of design standards for buildings in low-lying areas, and the construction of a "sponge city" that may absorb short-term torrential rains and gradually release the water later. All of the above should be listed as the salient points in the flood prevention and control program. These programs indeed could not be accomplished in the short term. They probably will take decades to gradually transform, but there must always be a starting point.

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