SEAS Professor Assesses Damage from Recent Typhoon Morakot in Taiwan
10/18/2009
(from The Record, Vol 35, No 03, by Melanie A. Farmer)
In September, engineering professor Hoe Ling led a United States reconnaissance team of engineers and scholars to study damage done by Typhoon Morakot, which devastated parts of southern Taiwan in August, killing hundreds.
Ling, professor of geotechnical engineering at the Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science, toured affected areas with his team to document different types of engineering failures that occurred because of this natural disaster. They were supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and the GEER Association at University of California-Berkeley.
"I saw landslides all over the place along the highways," he said. "The scale was something beyond imagination. The highways were cut off or half-closed or rerouted with temporary access roads. Whole bridges were washed away in some cases because of flooding." As of Sept. 8, there were 608 confirmed deaths, according to Taiwan's National Disaster Prevention and Protection Commission.
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Understanding failures |
The team's assessment of the damage is published in a 48-page report, A Reconnaissance Report on Typhoon Morakot, which details some of the worst structural failures Ling has seen, he said. This includes landslides, the collapse of many retaining walls due to landslides, buildings buried by debris or washed away by flooding and significant damage to bridges.
Probably the worst damage from the typhoon was in Taiwan's Hsia-lin village, which was buried entirely by the flooding landslides and debris flow. Only two houses were left standing by the time Ling's team witnessed the aftermath nearly a month later. More than 400 people were buried alive by the debris, his report found.
Typhoon Morakot is an indication of climate change, Ling said, while also demonstrating the limits of human intervention. "We live with nature and should minimize interruption to the natural process," he said. "I think we are not yet able to stop the massive landslides or debris flows."
The catastrophe in Taiwan does provide a learning opportunity. "The understanding of failures associated with this kind of extreme event is imperative in better preparing civil engineers to cope with global climate changes," said Ling. "The real experience of failures in a case like Taiwan give us some hints of how to respond appropriately to such kinds of disasters, and from an engineer's viewpoint, knowledge in planning and designing infrastructure that will be sustainable to such extreme conditions."
Ling, who joined Columbia in 1998, researches the behavior of geosystems such as slopes, ground, foundation and retaining walls subject to earthquakes and other natural disasters. In 1999, he made reconnaissance trips to Taiwan and Turkey after both countries experienced severe infrastructure damage from massive earthquakes. He actively collaborates with international institutions and agencies on his research.