Lushan is one of the most famous hot springs on the island. Located in the northeast of the nation's only landlocked county, legend has it that aborigines discovered the place while hunting. One day, following their injured prey, they noticed that the animal's wounds had healed after it fell in the spring. Japanese settlers developed the area into a resort during the colonial period (1895-1945) and named it Fuji Hot Spring.
Nobody is sure how long it will take for Lushan to heal, however, after the traumatic destruction brought on by Typhoon Sinlaku, a powerful storm that lashed Taiwan for an unusual length of time from Sept. 12 to 15. Torrential rains brought by the typhoon triggered huge landslides that dumped over 800,000 cubic meters of mud and rock on the area.
The swollen waters of the Taluowan River, which runs through Lushan, flooded half of the 40 resorts, hotels and bed and breakfasts in the region, forced 106 people to evacuate and buried a hotel manager alive.
On Sept. 15, flood waters washed away the foundations of the Kirei Hot Spring Hotel and Yuhchyr Cloud Resort, two well-known hotels in Lushan. The Kirei hotel began to tilt by mid-morning and the seven-story building completely collapsed and fell into the riverbed later that afternoon.
"It's all gone. The entire hotel crashed into the river. I've never seen anything like this in my life," a witness told local television channels.
As local authorities struggled to map out plans to restore the area, President Ma Ying-jeou and Premier Liu Chao-hsiuan visited the disaster zone Sept. 21.
Facing appeals from local residents and hot spring operators, Liu pledged a US$15.6-million budget for Lushan's reconstruction and instructed central government agencies to do their utmost to assist the county.
The Fourth River Basin Management Bureau of the Water Resources Agency under the Ministry of Economic Affairs, which oversees the Taluowan River, stated that over the past two years, it had dredged the river three times already, removing 60,000 cubic meters of gravel and rocks.
"After the dredging, the river should have been deep enough to allow for a larger discharge, even when swollen by heavy rainfalls," a bureau official said. "But Typhoon Sinlaku brought down so much mud and rock that the first floor of most buildings were filled up to the ceiling. What's worse, landslides triggered by Typhoon Jangmi, which hit Taiwan 10 days later, further deposited a tremendous amount of gravel onto the area."
The bureau estimated that the two typhoons caused altogether more than one million cubic meters of sediments to accumulate in the two-kilometer section of the Taluowan River that winds through Lushan.
"Our present plan is to dredge the downstream part of the river. Backhoes are working nonstop on the site. But we are worried that even if we manage to clean up this part, gravel will wash down from the upper stream again," the official added. "We simply don't know how long it will take to remove such an amount of rock and mud. It's a huge project."
The area's hotel and hot spring operators will have to be patient and wait for the work to be completed and their buildings cleared of debris before opening doors for business again. That means the Lushan Hot Spring Festival, originally scheduled to kick off in mid-October, was postponed. The annual festival was first launched in 2000 to revitalize the local economy scarred by the Sept. 21 earthquake in 1999.
"We don't know if the hotels and hot spring facilities will be ready for the festival, but we still hope to hold the activity," said Chen Yu-cheng, secretary-general of the Lushan Hot Spring Tourism Association, Oct. 14. "The area was severely damaged and since the landslides, tourists are avoiding the area."
While acknowledging the government's efforts to clean up rubble "day and night," Chen urged officials to make a special case of Lushan's plight. "It will take too long if the reconstruction process is carried out according to regular administrative procedures," the businessman noted.
Lushan's hot spring industry generates more than US$18.7 million in revenue every year, according to Wang Yuang-chung, deputy director-general of the Nantou County Government's department of tourism.
"The typhoons have caused losses to the region amounting to US$6.2 million. If reconstruction work cannot be completed by next January for the Lunar New Year, it is going to be hard to estimate how much the tourism sector will suffer," he said.
Apart from dredging the Taluowan River, the administration is also repairing roads connecting Lushan to its neighboring towns. "We'll need four to five months to return traffic to normal," Wang explained.
The official cautioned that 34 hectares of land along the upper stream of the river has been identified as an area at risk of further landslides since its soil is supersaturated with water. "Heavy rains are likely to cause another disaster," he added.
Since the tragedy took place, questions have been raised about the local authorities' inaction, over the years, with regard to the several unlicensed hot spring operators in Lushan, and their failure to take preventive measures against landslides despite Nantou County Councilor Chou Yi-hsiung's warning last year that damage could have been less extensive had fewer buildings been erected in the risky areas.
After having inspected the upper stream of the Taluowan River with structure engineers, Chou reported that the area at risk represented 5.4 million cubic meters of soil and rocks.
"In other words, suppose there are further landslides, we will need 540,000 trucks, each with a capacity of 10 cubic meters, to clean up the mud and rock," he said Sept. 16, the day after the collapse of the Kirei hotel.
"I kept urging the county government to take this problem seriously and was told at the time that officials were closely monitoring the zones at risk," Chou said.
When asked Oct. 13 why the county government had tolerated illegal hot spring hotels and bed and breakfasts in Lushan for so long and how many such operations were still running, the Department of Construction, which is responsible for the planning of the tourist attraction, declined to comment.
Write to Melody Chen at melodychen@mail.gio.gov.tw