Lushan Hot Springs in Hot Water?

Visiting the Lushan hot springs district in October, we park the car in a public lot on high ground then look over at the Taluowan River, flanked by row upon row of hotels. The place is deserted except for four or five backhoes hired by the Fourth River Management Office of the Water Resources Agency, that look more than a little overambitious as they scoop gravel out of the jammed waterway. The road and first floor of the buildings that sit behind the concrete revetment are completely buried in earth and rock. The surface of the "elevated road" remains rough and muddy.

It wasn't last fall's Typhoons Sinlaku and Jangmi that wrought this havoc. In fact, things looked quite different in July: both roads and a temporary bridge linking the upper and lower hot springs areas were open; the damage to the revetment along the Taluowan River had been repaired; the riverbed had been cleared to a depth of at least four meters; and some of the area's hotels had been repaired, cleaned up, and reopened for business. It was the August arrival of Typhoon Morakot that brought a year's worth of reconstruction to naught.

In the wake of nature's demonstration of its awesome destructive power, human beings are taking their turn at carving up the Taluowan. Though this is nominally reconstruction work, it's hard to believe that the wounds inflicted here will ever heal.

Competition is stiff among the rows of luxury hotels located on the fragile terrain of Taiwan's major hot-springs destinations. The hotels have suffered from the series of natural disasters that have pummeled these overdeveloped and environmentally overloaded areas. Unfortunately, hotel operators have focused only on rebuilding their own livelihoods, and blithely ignored the devastation right outside their doors.

A passing prosperity

Less than a century ago, the Lushan hot springs district was still a portion of the hunting grounds of the Seediq people, a serene area of alpine mountains and deep valleys. A leap into the Taluowan represented a chance to paddle back and forth between chilly creek water and scalding hot springs inflows.

The Japanese colonial government developed the area first, building the Fuji Hot Spring deep in the mountains in 1942 as a part of its Aboriginal policy. The spa, Taiwan's highest at an elevation of 1,100 meters, provided police officials with an opportunity to rest and recuperate. It also happened to be near the Mahebo Forest, where in 1930 the Seediq leader Mona Rudao had made his last stand in his resistance to the Japanese.

When President Chiang Kai-shek made an inspection tour of the area in 1950, he observed that the area reminded him of the mountains around Lushan in Jiangxi Province, changed its name from Fuji to Lushan, and rechristened the spa the Jingguang Mountain Villa.

When the government relaxed restrictions on visits to remote mountain areas in the 1970s, it began encouraging tourism in these regions. With little level ground available for development in the Lushan hinterlands, businesspeople from the lowlands began building illegally on the overbanks on both sides of the Taluowan. As hot springs facilities began to cluster together on both banks, it was only logical for the community to line the river with a concrete revetment. The river course was soon reduced to just a narrow channel only 20.3 meters in width, which is one of the causes of the present-day environmental overload.

When the Taiwanese economy took off in the 1980s, Lushan's hot springs were among the beneficiaries of the boom in domestic tourism. Hotel Tenlu, owned by Ten Ren Tea and in business in the area for 50 years, had its best decade ever. Proudly and with a touch of regret, hotel manager Chen Yucheng recalls, "In those days, our room occupancy rates were near 100%, and it was virtually impossible to get a room over the New Year's holidays."

It was a great destination for visitors, providing opportunities to stroll across the Lushan suspension bridge, soak their feet and cook an egg in the hot springs, enjoy the cherry blossoms in spring or the maple leaves in fall, make a side trip to Mt. Hehuan, and take an evening hot-spring bath at one of the area's hotels.

Though only 35.3 kilometers from the epicenter of 1999's Jiji Earthquake, Lushan came through physically relatively unscathed. But the tourism industry as a whole went into decline. Hotel operators strove to revive the area's fortunes, working together to innovate and promote sales. And, in spite of our extended recession, visitors seemed to be happy to participate in the revival of "the world's number one springs."

But disaster is a constant companion in the area. Typhoon Doug flooded the first floors of all the hotels on both banks in 1994, and the Jiji Earthquake loosened the earth over more than 5,000 hectares in the Taluowan and Zhoushui River watersheds in 1999. Numerous landslides in the years since have silted up the riverbed, with the result that every severe storm now triggers flooding and landslides. Last year's Typhoon Sinlaku caused the worst flooding in the area's history.

The route to the historical trail through the Mona Rudao battlefield features a hot springs upwelling that is steamy year round.(below) The clear water from Lushan's hot springs isn't the least bit sulfurous-you can drink it as well as bathe in it. Who needs luxurious indoor baths when you can enjoy communing with nature with a good soak right here?

An unprecedented calamity

Typhoon Sinlaku dumped more than 1,000 millimeters of rain on Nantou's Ren'ai Township on September 15, 2008. A flash flood roared down the Taluowan that morning. When a landslide came out of the hills, the Lushan Guesthouse, a one-story wooden structure located on the south bank of the Taluowan downstream from the suspension bridge, was the first to be engulfed. The family of three who ran the hotel were buried alive in the structure. Would-be rescuers on the scene wanted to dig them out, but were forced to abandon their plans when the rain began coming down even harder. (Two of the family members were later found alive by a professional rescue team.) Roughly 80 visitors and employees were forced to flee to the Jingguang Villa, which stands on higher ground.

By afternoon, the flooding had risen above the eight-meter-high revetment, the river bed had grown to more than four times its original 20-odd-meter width, and water was pouring into the hotels along both banks. On the north bank, the watery invasion brought down the Kirei Hot Spring Hotel and the Princess Resort. It also swept away the Hot Springs Rainbow Bridge, and washed away the foundations of two other hotels built near the river's bank. A total of 17 hotels and guesthouses were either destroyed outright or partially buried in mud and earth.

When Typhoon Jangmi struck two weeks later, the already severe congestion in the Taluowan riverbed rose higher, sending mud spilling out in all directions. Some 90% of the 40-odd hotels in the area saw flood waters rise past their first floors. The township administration estimates that total losses from the disaster amounted to more than NT$100 million.

People say you haven't truly visited Lushan until you've trekked across the suspension bridge.

The fight to save Lushan

In the wake of the disaster, Lushan's hot springs district became the focus of widespread attention. Everyone from the president and the premier to the heads of central and local government agencies inspected the area in person. Blame was initially directed at the heavy rains that had scoured the slopelands in the upstream water catchment, triggering serious landslides and flooding. The upstream flooding coupled with insufficient dredging of the Taluowan and the downstream Wanda Reservoir was thought to have placed Lushan in something like a watery vise.

But the media and public suspected that there were other factors in play, including illegal construction, illegal appropriation and misuse of land by the tourism industry, as well as hypocrisy and negligence at all levels of government. Even Song Gongliang, the head prosecutor with the Nantou District Prosecutors Office, couldn't help but exclaim, "There's simply no government here!" when he visited the site.

How severe was the illegal construction problem in Lushan? According to the Nantou County Government, only five of the 25 hotels and 16 guesthouses in the one-kilometer-long hot springs district had licenses to operate.

The main ways in which these operations were illegal included: (1) being in violation of zoning regulations-most of the hotels were built in zones designated for soil and water conservation, or on land intended for future public facilities such as parks and green spaces, or had made non-permitted expansions into "river areas"; (2) being in violation of the coverage or floor-area ratios-even buildings constructed before the Regional Planning Act took effect in 1980 could be in violation if later expansions cause their coverage or floor-area ratios to exceed those prescribed under the act.

Following a series of attacks and accusations in the wake of the 2008 typhoons, Nantou County Magistrate Lee Chao-ching stated to the media that the county government was intending to initiate a comprehensive zoning review in 2009. One portion of this would permit buildings sited on land designated for public facilities to apply for a rezoning permit. In the event that the rezoning brought these buildings into compliance, the county would request that they "return the favor" by doing something to benefit the locality. Lee said that the county would recommend demolition for hotels sited in river areas or other locations likely to threaten the environment or bring harm to themselves.

In the wake of the August 8, 2009 floods, the Fourth River Management Office once again spent large sums of money clearing rubble from the river. Meanwhile, local hotel operators collectively decided to abandon the debris-filled first stories of their buildings, and simply use their second stories as their first. They also won backing for the construction of a 3.5-meter-tall earth retaining wall atop the revetment.

Illegal construction tolerated?

But according to an April 2009 Control Yuan report admonishing the Executive Yuan, produced by Control Yuan members Lin Chu-liang and Hung Teh-shuan, in 2001, during the tenure of county magistrate Pang Pai-hsien, the Nantou County Government had responded to the Control Yuan's determination that it had been negligent in its oversight by stating that it was "currently engaged in the second round of comprehensive zoning inspections in the Lushan hot springs district to resolve the issue of illegal hotels and non-permitted structures." This issue has been such a hot potato for both the ruling and opposition parties that no progress was made over the following seven years.

The 2009 report also states that a survey by the Fourth River Management Office of the Water Resources Agency showed that while one of the 11 illegal structures identified within river areas (the Lushan Hotel located on the Mahaipu River) has been washed away and the remains of two others (the collapsed Kirei Hot Spring Hotel and the Princess Resort) were cleared away by the Nantou County Government in October 2008, eight have yet to be removed. But in its response to the report, the WRA argued: "Utilization of river areas accounts for only a small fraction of the buildings' structures. If these portions are demolished, it could affect the structural integrity of the whole building. We therefore can only set a deadline for [building owners] to demolish these portions themselves...." The implication is that the infringement is slight and does not require forceful official intervention.

When the media recently again broached the issue of illegal structures, Nantou's deputy county magistrate Chen Tze-ching repeatedly stated that "all structures located in river areas and having a pressing effect on flood prevention have been completely demolished." He also explained with some exasperation that the county government's annual budget for the removal of illegal structures is only NT$480,000, and that the request it made to the county council to be allowed to set illegal structure demolition fees itself was rejected. "It takes time and effort to survey and demolish illegal structures," says Chen. "Don't fixate on Lushan. This is a national problem."

Tarred with accusations of illegal and indiscriminate construction, local hotel industry figures have begun making counteraccusations. Chen Yufeng, the current president of the Lushan Hot Springs Tourism Association, says that in the early days the Taluowan was still a "wild" stream, unmanaged by water resources agencies, and that the water level in the bed was quite low. When the industry started building here, the so-called "appropriation of waterways" wasn't an issue. It was only after the Jiji Earthquake, when almost daily landslides began raising the level of the riverbed by an average of two meters per year, that the problem emerged. "The more serious issue is TaiPower's neglect of its duty downstream," argues Chen. "It has never cleared the silt in its Wanda Reservoir. The resulting accumulation of gravel upstream made the Lushan hot springs disaster worse."

There are reportedly currently more than 80 million cubic meters of silt in the Wanda Reservoir, yet TaiPower is currently only willing to remove about 100,000 cubic meters per year-a drop in the bucket. But there are simply no good ways of dealing with the problem. Standard dredging methods can't be used because there is no practical way to dispose of the dredged silt. And downstream residents would strongly object to releasing the silt in their direction.

Chen, who has run Lushan's Green Hotel as a family business for 32 years, says that it was his industry that put Lushan on the map. "A few of the major hotels even established offices in the northern, central, and southern parts of Taiwan to drum up business. The efforts of any one of those hotels have outshone those of the county tourism bureau." He grumbles that now the hotels, which were the first to suffer from the disaster, are being "punished."

He complains that at the start of this year, the county government, under pressure from the Control Yuan's report, fined 21 illegal hotels that had restarted operations by their own efforts about NT$250,000 each, citing violations of the Tourism Development Act and regulations governing the hotel industry. "That's just rubbing salt into the wound!" exclaims Chen. Upset, the hotel operators have collectively refused to pay the fines and are in the process of filing an appeal.

Competition is stiff among the rows of luxury hotels located on the fragile terrain of Taiwan's major hot-springs destinations. The hotels have suffered from the series of natural disasters that have pummeled these overdeveloped and environmentally overloaded areas. Unfortunately, hotel operators have focused only on rebuilding their own livelihoods, and blithely ignored the devastation right outside their doors.

A new worry

In late October 2008, a month and a half after Typhoon Jangmi, the Nantou County Government proposed the Lushan Hot Springs Reconstruction Project to the Executive Yuan. At the time, the focus of the reconstruction efforts was "disaster relief and the rapid restoration of Lushan's vitality." At the same time, the Fourth River Management Office of the Water Resources Agency and the Council of Agriculture's Soil and Water Conservation Bureau and Forestry Bureau proposed plans and a budget for landslide cleanup and river dredging in upstream forest areas.

Meanwhile, hotels in the Lushan hot springs district were busily rebuilding. In addition to clearing out gravel and stone and repairing their facilities (including hot spring wells, pipes, equipment rooms, and hot spring baths), they spent NT$5 million on building retaining walls. They also organized joint promotions as the hot-springs bathing season approached. "Everybody was determined to get things back on track," says Chen. But some hotel operators couldn't afford to rebuild-it cost roughly NT$50 million to repair the 137-room Hotel Tenlu-and left the business.

Then a major new worry emerged: the Ministry of Economic Affairs' Central Geological Survey (CGS) had discovered that the north slope of the Lushan hot springs district was at risk of a landslide. The danger is centered on a slope 400 meters high, and involves a slip surface thought to cover 34 hectares. A large, rapid landslide would not only bury the Taluowan, but also every building in the hot springs district.

But this unfortunate news wasn't exactly new. In 2007 Nantou County Council member Chou Yi-hsiung had hired Xie Jinxun, a licensed civil engineer, to carry out a study that reached a similar conclusion. But Xie's study was considered alarmist and subsequently ignored. In fact, it didn't receive serious attention from the cross-ministerial team handling the Lushan reconstruction project until the CGS issued another warning in the wake of Typhoon Sinlaku. At that point, Tsai Hsung-hsiung, who was then a minister without portfolio and now heads up the Council for Economic Planning and Development, forcefully advocated relocation and asked the CGS to evaluate safer locations in the Lushan area.

According to Lin Chao-chung, director of the CGS, "If Typhoon Morakot had dumped that huge volume of rain on Lushan, the hot springs district would have been wiped out just like Xiaolin Village." The scale of the potential slide is so great that there's no effective way to counter it. All the CGS can do is strengthen monitoring efforts. When the slip susceptibility index rises to abnormally high levels, the CGS will issue a warning to the Ministry of the Interior's Central Disaster Response Center (CDRC).

In fact, a mandatory evacuation drill was held in the hot springs district the day after Morakot struck. It took place on the afternoon of August 9, when CGS instruments determined that the sudden rains had caused the north slope to slide two centimeters. The CGS immediately notified its superiors at the Ministry of Economic Affairs, which in turn notified the CDRC. The Ren'ai Township administration acted that night, evacuating 62 tourists, businesspeople, and hotel employees to a safer location. The crisis was deemed to have passed when the slope didn't move any more over the next two days. Even though nothing untoward happened, the drill helped heighten residents' awareness of concerns about the area's geology.

Chunyang Village, located on lands reserved for indigenous peoples, has been selected as the new location for the Lushan hot springs. Situated 20 meters above the surrounding terrain, the new site will be safe from Taluowan flooding. Development, however, has not yet begun: it's awaiting the completion of environmental impact and transportation studies.

Another Xiaolin?

Early this year, intense negotiations between the central and local governments led to acknowledgement that Lushan north slope slippage and Taluowan River flooding are disasters waiting to happen. They therefore established as principles of reconstruction the relocation and redevelopment of the Lushan hot springs district, and the implementation of tighter restrictions on the original site.

The Lushan hot springs district had already been designated one of two sites of "severely damaged national lands representing an immediate threat" in the draft National Land Planning Act. (The other was the Xiaolin Village destroyed by Typhoon Morakot.) It therefore had priority for restoration and could also, when necessary, be subjected to bans on land development or use, residency restrictions, and compulsory relocation.

The site selected for the relocation effort is a 27-hectare plateau located two miles downstream from Lushan in Chunyang Village, which also has hot springs. Overseen by National Taiwan University, it currently has only a single hotel. The county government intends to encourage businesses in the Lushan hot springs district to invest here by establishing contractual land use rights. Right now, Chunyang's only connection to the outside world is a bridge across the Taluowan. Pending passage of an environmental impact assessment, the county plans to make Chunyang a more attractive tourism destination by building a 3.8-kilometer-long cable-car route linking it to Cingjing Farm.

The route to the historical trail through the Mona Rudao battlefield features a hot springs upwelling that is steamy year round.(below) The clear water from Lushan's hot springs isn't the least bit sulfurous-you can drink it as well as bathe in it. Who needs luxurious indoor baths when you can enjoy communing with nature with a good soak right here?

Lushan and Chunyang

Some 28 hotels and businesses have so far registered their support for the government's relocation plan, most of them riverside hotels that have been severely damaged over the last year.

Cai Songtian, owner of the Songtian Villa and a former head of the Hot Springs Association, says, "When Lushan was again ravaged by Morakot, more and more people began to come to the conclusion that relocation was our only hope." They hope the government can offer them tax breaks and low-interest loans to facilitate the move.

But Hotel Tenlu, the Lushan landmark already battered by repeated disasters, is leaning towards staying. The Ten Ren Group has the financial resources to rebuild, and the hotel is legally sited. Chen Yucheng, the hotel's manager, admits that won't be easy: "The government isn't restoring the upstream catchment basin, and isn't dealing with the silting of the dam downstream. All it's doing is relying on the River Management Office to clear this one-kilometer stretch of river, which is completely useless. They can never fully clear it because earth and stones will continue to come down and accumulate." Yet while Chunyang is safe now, its only road bridge to the outside may one day be buried in silt, and the cable car plan is still highly controversial, so there is still great uncertainty about the relocation plan.

Whether for the relocation or against it, Lushan's hotel operators don't see it happening for at least three or four years. To preserve their current livelihoods and ensure that they are situated at both locations, members of the business community are aggressively pursuing investment incentives for Chunyang, while busily rebuilding in Lushan.

After Typhoon Morakot, the Hot Springs Association used their legislator to get the Water Resources Agency to spend NT$4.75 million on a project to build earth retaining walls downstream from Lushan's suspension bridge and on a township administration effort to repair the road. The association's objective was to add a 3.5-meter retaining wall atop the existing six-meter-tall revetment, and to raise the road to make it level with the second stories of the flanking hotels. The hotel operators were unanimous-hereafter, they would use their second floors as their first floors.

These kinds of hasty projects were clearly at odds with the Executive Yuan's emphasis on exercising greater restraint in reconstruction. It seems very likely that when the Water Resources Agency redraws the flood zone boundaries, and the county government next year finally deals with the illegal construction problem, officialdom and "public opinion" will again be sharply at odds with one another.

The severe silting of the Wanda Reservoir on the lower reaches of the Taluowan River has resulted in upstream sedimentation and reduced the capacity of the reservoir. Unfortunately, the Fourth River Management Office of the Water Resources Agency estimates that it would cost at least NT$20 billion to fully remove the silt. Transporting the silt out of the mountains presents yet another problem.

Whither reconstruction?

Lushan's hot springs district has been struck by numerous natural disasters in recent years, including flooding of riverside structures on July 2, 2004, typhoon damage to several parts of the revetment in 2007, and three typhoons since 2008. The old approach to dealing with the challenges posed by frequent natural disasters-engineering works-has clearly proved ineffective.

Teng Sheng-hsuan, a civil engineer who has been surveying catastrophe mechanisms in the Lushan area for the last year, says that while the government needs to protect the livelihoods, lives, and property of the businesspeople in the hot springs district, it should also weigh the economic benefits against the costs of reconstruction. The hot springs district generates about NT$600 million in annual revenues versus far more than NT$600 million in costs for dredging of the river channel, restoration of collapsed portions of the water catchment zone, and the construction of check dams and consolidation works. "This doesn't include the environmental and social costs," says Teng. While conservation methods can appear to be negative and even opposed to economic development, what they actually do is place a "stop-loss" on the bottomless pit of engineering works expenses, which is much more in keeping with the principles of social justice.

And it's not just Lushan. More than 10 hot springs tourism areas around Taiwan suffer from long-term overdevelopment, weak oversight, and a vacuum of state power. These areas have reached a crossroads: Should they continue to develop tourism, or should they take the path towards the conservation of national lands? The Ministry of Economic Affairs promulgated the Hot Spring Act in 2005, designating hot springs as a natural resource belonging to the state. To date, however, only Beitou's hot spring district has implemented a system whereby all spring water use is controlled by the managing authority. Elsewhere, hot springs management plans remain largely nominal.

The sad thing is that tourism, the non-smokestack industry in which everyone had invested so much hope, has turned out to be an ecological criminal that in turn has been harshly punished by becoming a victim of natural disasters.

Whither the Lushan hot springs? Is the Taiwanese tourism industry the canary in the coal mine? Can we use the memories of Typhoon Morakot and public outrage to change people's thinking, to get them to respect nature again, to let go of our efforts to control the natural world and learn to coexist with floods and other natural disasters? Our executive and legislative bodies need to earnestly address these issues. So too does the public at large.

The idea that you have to fight to win is almost universal among Taiwanese. But have years of misfortune persuaded Lushan's hotel operators that they're in a no-win situation? The white sign at the back of the photo belongs to the buried Lushan Hotel.