EN·Nov 14, 2025

Foreword

On the evening of Friday, November 14th, Black Bear Academy held its second post-disaster forum on Guangfu. Fu, the executive director, joked in his opening remarks: instead of going out on a Friday night, you all came here — to what’s been called the stronghold of stubborn Taiwan-independence forces wanted by the other side — to listen to a disaster relief talk about faraway “Hualien Country.” You people aren’t quite normal.

Unlike the first forum, which took the perspective of volunteers providing support, the second forum’s three speakers were:

Kang Kang — Black Bear evacuation instructor, and also a Guangfu disaster victim
Huang Ying-hao — Black Bear evacuation instructor, Associate Professor in the Department of Ethnic Relations and Social Work at National Dong Hwa University, long involved in post-disaster reconstruction
Lin Yu-de — Director of Legislator Puma Shen’s Hualien office, a long-time local political worker

From what they shared, what emerged wasn’t just mud, collapse, and rebuilding, but the details of post-disaster life, the weight of emotion, and the structural risks Hualien has long carried.

The People Who Used to Live Here

For volunteers who went to support the relief effort, or netizens following the recovery progress online, “Foze Street” is the famous disaster zone — marked on maps with notes like “hell dungeon” and “newbies stay away,” as if the volunteers heading to Foze Street were a different breed of hero.

But to Kang Kang, this isn’t just a spot that needs volunteer help. It’s also where his family lives.

Kang Kang’s aunt’s house sits at the end of Lane 46, Foze Street. The building’s structure survived the mudflow, but the neighbors in front weren’t so lucky. A wooden sign with an A4 sheet of paper taped to it marks the address. The sign isn’t even laminated or waterproofed — just held together with tape. One heavy rain could wipe out the address marker for a spot that once had a home.

The debris left on the ground are traces of destruction that had to happen in order to save and dig people out.

For volunteers, clearing out a house feels like clearing a dungeon in a game. Maybe in the moment, physical exhaustion covers up the emotion, the way mud covered the living room.

For the disaster victims and families whose homes are no longer livable, what’s broken isn’t just a house — it might be the whole family.

For the children of Guangfu, what’s been buried isn’t just the living room, but the memories of growing up.

“If I had money, I’d want to buy back that old furniture.”

Because of his work, Kang Kang had the chance to interview some families. Watching new furniture slowly arrive, he asked a young boy what he wanted most.

“There used to be a big wooden cabinet here — it was the best hiding spot for hide-and-seek. It’s gone now.”

As the relief system, post-disaster workers, and residents work hard to bring life back on track, what we see is functional recovery.

But in the boy’s eyes, even brand-new furniture can’t bring back the memories of childhood.

Without enough manpower and resources for repairs, even after more than fifty days, many houses still have broken doors and windows sealed only with plywood and tarps. No materials, no craftsmen to be found — so people just keep holding on like this.

Rooms that weren’t flooded and are still livable are crammed with extra beds, whole families sleeping in the same space; septic tanks haven’t been cleared, so toilets can’t be used. Waking up every morning unable to use the bathroom, needing to pee in the middle of the night — these remain daily challenges for residents in the disaster zone.

More than a month later, are you scared now? Kang Kang asked another little girl.

“Yesterday I dreamed I fell into the mud. I woke up scared and cried.”

If the first forum on November 11th took us through the technical, reflective lens of how to improve relief operations in the disaster zone,
then the second forum’s speaker Kang Kang brought us back from organizations, functions, and missions, to being human again — connecting with local residents.

So where did the residents who couldn’t evacuate vertically go when the disaster struck?

According to Guangfu Township’s planning, the first evacuation shelter was Guangfu Vocational High School — which itself was later severely damaged. After some residents had already arrived there, they were told that due to the danger, they had to leave and move to the second shelter, Dajin Elementary School, next to the Guangfu Sugar Refinery.

Professor Huang Ying-hao, who has worked in post-disaster recovery as a disaster survivor himself since the 921 earthquake, and who has been through the Morakot typhoon, the Sichuan earthquake, the 0206 and 0403 earthquakes, and is now still in the middle of Guangfu’s recovery, is arguably among the most experienced people in Taiwan when it comes to post-disaster work.

Every morning at 10am, Professor Huang holds a briefing with all the NGOs stationed at Dajin Elementary School, coordinating tasks and exchanging information.

Shelter administration is a massive, tangled workload, but it rarely gets social attention. Everything from receiving and distributing supplies, handling boxed meals, environmental sanitation, to helping arrange classes and activities that enrich the daily routines of children and the elderly — so that able-bodied adults can go back to the disaster zone to clean up their homes and join the recovery effort — all falls within a shelter’s scope of work.

Local NGOs are an extremely important part of this disaster response. Organizations that used to deliver meals to elderly residents could use their existing case lists to confirm whether every household was safely settled. Foundations that had long cared for grandparent-headed households quickly took over post-disaster care coordination for those families.

These NGOs have long-term, deep understanding of the community’s context, household conditions, and relationship networks. Civil defense groups, self-organized training groups, or teams hoping to support frontline operations in extreme environments — if they haven’t interacted with these NGOs during normal times — are likely to miss out on crucial intelligence and understanding of the environment.

The volunteers known to the outside world are mostly the “shovel supermen,” medical volunteers, or “little bees” providing frontline support in the disaster zone. But if these social welfare organizations hadn’t quickly moved into the shelters to help run and manage them, the large number of temporarily homeless Guangfu residents would have been living in chaos.

These NGOs, with their long-term commitment to local care, hold up that fragile safety net — yet at the very first moment the disaster struck, they caught every resident who needed help with remarkable resilience. And they don’t exist only when disaster strikes; society shouldn’t only notice them during disasters either (even today, after the disaster, their work still goes largely unseen by most people).

Volunteer Ethics and Justice in the Disaster Zone: The Things Nobody Wants to Talk About, But Someone Has to Decide Every Day

On the ground in a disaster, it’s easy to see the needs of the victims. But the needs of the support workers are often overlooked. Many outside donations are earmarked specifically for disaster victims, which creates restrictions on how supplies can be used. When food, water, drinks, and snacks are restricted to disaster victims only, can the social workers or volunteers who’ve been sleeping on the floor of a shelter for days use these resources?

In Japan, to avoid occupying disaster relief resources, rescue teams typically bring all their own supplies. But post-disaster recovery is long-term work — once the immediate needs of disaster victims are confirmed to be met, can rescue or working teams share in the resources?

Taiwanese people have enormous generosity, donating huge amounts of money and supplies to disaster zones. But at the same time, Taiwanese people also have insufficient trust in institutions and professional services, overlooking the fact that care workers are people too, and also have needs for supplies and resources. The NGOs supporting them may lack sufficient funding to raise their staff’s pay or provide better, more professional care and support.

When NGOs and social welfare workers hold up the residents of a disaster zone, can our society hold up these workers?

Beyond the question of whether supplies can be used, volunteers on the relief and logistics front also face many challenges: can residents not on the official roster receive supply meals? Can family pets that survived the disaster enter the shelters?

Guangfu Township’s garbage trucks used to be mainly stationed at the square in front of Baoan Temple. Now, having completely lost its waste disposal capacity and relying heavily on support from other districts, must volunteers take all the garbage they generate away with them?

Beyond the ethical dilemmas volunteers face, residents who’ve lost their homes face different kinds of psychological strain. As volunteers help clear the mud out of a house, each “should we keep this?” or “can this be thrown away?” often allows only a few seconds — yet forces a life-or-death judgment on one object after another. No matter who you are, it’s not easy.

Raising these observations doesn’t come with answers. Perhaps understanding the environment and potential disasters, and being well prepared, is the only thing we can do in advance.

Resources, Justice, and Distribution of Supplies: Who Counts as a “Real Disaster Victim”?

Whether in the news or on social media, distrust of the county government and debates over supply management issues keep clashing. In practice, the distribution and delivery of these resources is extremely difficult. In the process of post-disaster recovery, who is qualified to receive supplies, who should receive them first, how limited supplies should be distributed, and even cases of households that don’t need aid reselling it — these are all enormous tests for post-disaster recovery and social trust.

Some subsidies, or donated appliances from the public, are limited in quantity, so distribution tries to prioritize the disadvantaged. But there are also near-poor households who fall just a few hundred or a thousand NT dollars short of the eligibility threshold, and end up excluded from the list of recipients.

In the early stages of the disaster, government subsidies (both central and local) were calculated by household, causing situations where a single damaged house shared by multiple registered households could receive two or three subsidies.

Beyond that, some landlords who are registered at the address received subsidies, while the tenants who actually live there couldn’t claim anything. The cost of repairs and the pressure of housing fall on the tenants, who have no funds to deal with it.

But from the government’s perspective, whoever is on the household registration counts. If, in the midst of a disaster, budgets and supplies had to be allocated based on other criteria (such as actual residency), it could instead cause administrative delays, making it harder for emergency relief funds to reach victims in the first place.

Beyond household headcount, each house’s disaster damage also varies. Houses in Guangfu’s town center might still be livable, while on Foze Street, even if a house’s structure is still intact, the meter-high layer of mud outside could wash back into the house in the next heavy rain. Houses flooded to knee height and houses flooded to the second floor receive the same amount of subsidy — it doesn’t account for actual loss.

On the ground after a disaster, it’s hard to say things are just.

But is the pursuit of post-disaster justice something society should even pursue?

Professor Huang also pointed out, drawing on other international disaster relief cases, that disaster is never neutral or equal. Education and economic ability affect people’s knowledge and capacity to respond to disaster, and also affect the channels through which they receive information about potential hazards. Digital natives who heavily use phones and the internet can receive disaster information faster than the elderly, and in the case of the South Asian tsunami, restrictions from traditional clothing and cultural discouragement of women learning to swim led to a much higher death rate among women.

Disaster itself is unequal. And post-disaster assistance can almost never achieve true justice and equality.

These problems occur in almost every disaster, and how to strike a balance among these considerations isn’t something this forum could find an answer to. Forums like this can only help remind us that the problem exists. Perhaps it takes sustained social attention, and more people getting involved in practice and academia, before we can slowly find a direction.

Local Politics, the Neighborhood System, and Civil Society

Hualien has always had a somewhat special status among all of Taiwan’s counties and cities. Hualien isn’t just Hualien “during a disaster” — it also carries the structural and political realities built up over many years.

Hualien is arguably one of the counties with the most disaster (and disaster relief) experience in all of Taiwan. Whenever earthquakes and typhoons strike, Hualien’s natural geological conditions and location make the challenges especially severe. Major earthquakes like 0206, 0918, and 0413 have repeatedly devastated Hualien.

Hualien’s population is roughly a quarter each Mainlander-descended, Taiwanese, Hakka, and Indigenous. In the aging township of Guangfu, the average age of village and neighborhood chiefs is also on the high side nationally.

This complex demographic and linguistic composition, combined with a genuinely elderly neighborhood-chief system, becomes especially fragile during a disaster.

Even a young, able-bodied person would get worn out fielding hundreds of phone calls a day, let alone a neighborhood chief in his sixties or seventies. Normally they might get only a few calls a week; now, with information spreading fast and information about the disaster zone still scarce, the moment a chief’s phone number gets out, the volume of incoming calls becomes more than any ordinary person can handle.

Some chiefs, out of desperation, simply turned off their phones to avoid being swallowed by anxiety. The elderly neighborhood system struggles to connect in the information age. How society can have younger generations step in when elders can no longer keep up — and even in normal times, close the information gap through generational handover — has become a resilience risk every region must face.

Hualien’s geographic and administrative divisions are another issue worth rethinking. Beyond the fact that township divisions, drawn from a Han Chinese perspective, ignore the geographic ties of traditional indigenous tribal territories, today’s administrative boundaries also fail to account for Hualien’s unique river-system ecology.

In this disaster, we saw both Guangfu and Fenglin, on either side of the Matai’an River, suffer damage. Under the current administrative division, resource allocation and decision-making end up too rigidly divided, ignoring the reality of the natural hydrology.

Professor Huang pointed out that we should accelerate our review of how the various river systems along Hualien’s long, narrow terrain carry similar risks. Redrawing administrative boundaries in the short term isn’t realistic, but could we instead use the lens of disaster prevention zones to integrate early-warning operations and disaster prevention planning across different administrative districts sharing the same river system in advance? That might well determine our response the next time disaster strikes.

Command Systems and Sense of Space: One Disaster, Many Command Posts

The overflow of the Matai’an River barrier lake caused Provincial Highway 9’s Matai’an Bridge to break, sweeping away its piers. The drive from Ji’an in Hualien to Guangfu, which used to take about 45 minutes, now takes 80–90 minutes. This disaster didn’t just change Guangfu’s landscape — it also changed the sense of distance in space.

People don’t have much of a feel for straight-line distance; they measure by “travel time.” And in this disaster, that measure has been redefined.

The Hualien County Fire Department’s emergency response center is set up in Hualien City. Because of his role advancing the Resilient Taiwan Project at National Dong Hwa University, Professor Huang arrived at the disaster response center on the 24th. The response center has lots of information, screens, and constant disaster briefings. But each individual number pushes the scene further away. So the next day, Professor Huang decided to go directly to the site.

Stationed at the Hualien Sugar Refinery this time weren’t just the widely known local command center and the central government’s forward coordination office — there was also an engineering-section command post and a military command post. Every time there was a meeting, Lin Yu-de always had to double-check which unit’s command center he was actually heading to this time.

Past disaster responses have often needed a lot of effort to coordinate between central and local governments led by different parties. But the political arena around this disaster is even more complex — perhaps due to Hualien’s unique regional political atmosphere and the former county chief’s role in the Legislative Yuan. Under these layered relationships, there’s been an added layer of obvious hostility and animosity, making the already difficult relief work even more challenging.

Starting from Guangfu: A Reminder for the Future and for Other Places

The Potential Risk of Super Levees

The NT$27 billion plus NT$3 billion Hualien relief fund passed by the Legislative Yuan will be used, besides rebuilding the Matai’an Bridge, farmland, and infrastructure, for one particular project: a super levee.

This levee is planned to be built along the Matai’an River, to ensure that a similar disaster won’t sweep into the town center again.

But the Matai’an River bends north near Atolan. If the levee is only built on the south side, that necessarily means the water will surge straight toward Atolan. If the east side at Atolan is also blocked off, then we also need to carefully assess whether the structure’s strength is sufficient — or whether it will cause even greater damage in the next flood.

A Wish List Platform

In this series of forums, Yu-de brought up again a problem that shows up in nearly every disaster relief effort or large-scale social movement: it’s hard to balance the types and quantities of supplies needed.

Many needed supplies never arrive, but as Karen said in the previous forum, if a public call for donations goes out, the amount received could end up dozens or even a hundred times what’s actually needed. And for some other needed items — like the medical equipment YuTin mentioned — the specialized nature of the items means well-intentioned donors can’t purchase and deliver the correct items on their own.

For a problem like this, perhaps Taiwan could consider adopting a tool that American e-commerce platforms provide to influencers: the Wish List. NGOs or institutions could act as the unit, setting up a wish list with specific quantities directly on an e-commerce platform, letting members of the public who want to donate simply purchase the items directly.

This way, the needed items and quantities can avoid the problem of overflow, while also directly solving the problems of item communication and the flow of funds and procurement.

The Road to Recovery: What Can We Do

This barrier lake overflow on the Matai’an River has once again shown us the power of nature and the fragility of a place.

After the rush of disaster relief fades, continuing to care about local politics in Hualien, going there in person, and building connections with local people are all ways we can help make Hualien a better place. We can also find foundations or public interest groups and encourage the work and projects they’re building deep roots in Hualien.

Only through sustained attention, and by keeping our eyes and focus on this place, can we help its development keep moving in a good direction.

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