When the Rain Came Like a Wall: Life After Fung-wong Swept Through Taiwan
In the harbour town of Suao, the night air still smelled of salt and mud. Boats rocked gently at their moorings as men and women hauled out soggy mats and plastic buckets, scraping a pale slurry of silt from doorways and kitchens.
“The water came in so quickly,” said fisherman Hung Chun-yi, wiping a streak of grey from his brow as he shoveled sludge from his stoop. His first floor had been submerged to about 60 centimetres. “It rained so much, and so fast, the drainage couldn’t take it.”
The image of water rising to neck level — soldiers wading through streets to reach trapped families, rescue crews ferrying the elderly to dry ground, televisions broadcasting the same scenes of muddy, relentless inundation — is now etched into the memory of eastern Taiwan this week. More than 8,300 people were moved to safer locations as Typhoon Fung-wong, though weakened, dumped extraordinary rain on the island’s rugged coastlines. The torrential arrival left 51 people injured, and thousands of lives upended for a time.
Numbers that Tell a Story
Weather officials reported a month-record downpour in Suao: 648 millimetres in a single day, the most rain recorded there for the month on record. Over 1,000 homes in the town were flooded. Elsewhere in Yilan County and neighbouring Hualien, images of waters swelling above walls and racing down mountain ravines were beamed into living rooms across the nation.
Local authorities and the fire department concentrated evacuations primarily in Yilan and Hualien — regions that lie along Taiwan’s steep, tree-draped eastern flank. The monsoon surge pushed north, and when a late-season typhoon arrived from the south, the two systems briefly conspired to pound the same places with relentless rain.
On the Ground
Soldiers and volunteers worked through the night. Captain Lin Wei-hao, leading a search-and-rescue detachment, described the challenge simply: “The current makes everything unpredictable. You can see a road one moment and the next it’s a channel of foam and debris.”
At a makeshift relief centre, a woman named Mei — a bakery owner whose shop in Yilan had flooded — passed out steaming bowls of radish soup to volunteers. “When the water came, we grabbed what mattered and left,” she said. “Someone next door grabbed their photo albums. Someone else, their cat. We’re tired, but we have neighbours.”
It was ordinary, human detail — the handing over of a thermos, the careful folding of soaked garments, the quiet tally of losses — that made the disaster feel less like a televised statistic and more like a community’s slow, stubborn refusal to be defined by calamity.
Why This Storm Matters Beyond Taiwan
Fung-wong had already carved a path of devastation through parts of the Philippines before it reached Taiwan, where authorities linked it to 27 deaths there. Across East Asia, the season has already carried a grim tally: only weeks prior, floods from a September typhoon claimed 18 lives in Hualien County, underscoring how vulnerable mountainous coastal regions are to sudden, extreme rainfall.
Typhoon season in the western North Pacific tends to peak in the summer months, but what has alarmed forecasters is not merely frequency; it is timing and intensity. “Summer is getting longer and typhoons are arriving later and later,” Huang En-hong, a forecaster at Taiwan’s Central Weather Administration, told reporters. “Climate change could cause similar more extreme weather events, but more study was needed to establish a trend.”
That caution is important. Scientific consensus, including assessments from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), indicates that a warming atmosphere holds more moisture — which tends to translate into heavier rainfall when storms form. It also suggests that while the total number of storms might not spike dramatically, the proportion of very intense storms could rise.
Resilience, Infrastructure and the Global Supply Chain
Some reassurances came quickly: Fung-wong was forecast to skirt the southern tip of Taiwan before moving back out into the open Pacific, and the island’s technology hub around Hsinchu — home to the world’s largest contract chipmaker, TSMC — was not expected to take a direct hit. For a global economy still on edge over semiconductor supply chains, that mattered.
But the calamity raises broader questions. How do communities adapt when flooding becomes a repeated trauma? How do infrastructure design, land-use planning, and emergency systems change when an event once considered “rare” arrives with new regularity?
“Our drainage systems were built for a different climate,” said Dr. Alex Wu, a civil engineer at a Taiwanese university who studies urban flood resilience. “The old models assume a storm time and place. Today, storms deliver their rainfall faster and in more concentrated bursts. We need more flexible, nature-based solutions — wetlands, permeable pavements, river buffers — alongside hardened defences.”
Small Stories, Big Themes
There is something profoundly human in how people respond to such crises. In a village near the coast, a teenage volunteer named Lin Yu brought her grandmother to the evacuation centre and then returned to help clean up her neighbour’s shop.
“We could lose things,” she said, “but we still have each other.” It’s a sentiment echoed in neighbourhood WhatsApp groups where offers of borrowed pumps, spare drying racks and cups of tea come before formal aid arrives.
That grassroots solidarity matters. But so does government planning. Taiwan’s emergency alert systems and a culture of frequent drills — part of a society that contends with earthquakes and typhoons as regular facts of life — likely reduced the human toll. Still, the repeated disruptions to livelihoods, the damage to housing, and the mounting repair bills press against fragile household budgets.
What Comes Next?
- Immediate recovery: clearing roads, repairing electrical lines, and helping families return safely to their homes.
- Mid-term: assessing infrastructure weaknesses — storm drains, river embankments, emergency shelters — and directing funds to resilient upgrades.
- Long-term: integrating climate projections into planning, protecting natural buffers, and ensuring social safety nets for those most affected.
For Taiwan, as for many places around the planet, these are no longer theoretical exercises. They are policy choices that will determine whether communities can withstand the next storm and the one after that.
A Final Thought
Standing on a muddy roadside, Hung Chun-yi looked out over the harbour, the waves smoothing themselves into a glassy hush as if nothing had happened. He shook his head and gave a wry laugh: “We’ve always done this — cleared the mess and gone fishing again. But this was something else.”
What happens in Suao, in Yilan, in small coastal towns across the world, ripples far beyond their shores. When infrastructure creaks, economies strain, and communities rally, the choices made now — to invest, to plan, to listen to scientists and to local voices — will tell the story of how we weather an uncertain climate.
So I ask you, reading this from wherever you are: how prepared is your town for the next wall of water? And what are you willing to change so that when the rain comes, it doesn’t come like a wall?
