The first phase of the environmental impact assessment process for planned improvements to the Suhua Highway, which runs along the east coast from Suao (蘇澳) to Hualien (花蓮), was passed after just 14 days — quite possibly the quickest ever for such a controversial and major project. Last month, Typhoon Megi badly damaged the highway, causing a heavy toll of injuries and deaths. Unfortunately Hualien County Commissioner Fu Kun-chi has seen fit to blame environmentalist groups for the tragedy, thus causing discussion of an important policy issue to lose its rational focus.

When serving as an environmental impact assessor for the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) from 2005 to 2007, I took part in impact assessment work for a plan to build a freeway between Suao and Hualien.

At the end of 1999, in the run-up to the 2000 presidential election, the then-governing Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) proposed building a freeway between Suao and Hualien and the plan passed its impact assessment in four short months. In fact, it was put forward and passed as an incidental motion at an environmental impact assessment conference.

No lesson was drawn from the inaccuracy of the geological survey carried out for the Hsuehshan Tunnel (雪山隧道), then under construction, which led to a collapse when workers boring the tunnel struck a fault zone. Groundwater gushed into the tunnel, taking the lives of several talented engineers, ruining the costly boring machine and causing the loss of a great quantity of groundwater that had accumulated over tens of thousands of years. Nor was any consideration given to the fact that the proposed freeway would cut through 11 geological faults and up to 10 other geologically sensitive areas.

The motive for the rushed approval process was clearly to win votes by pushing through a populist policy without regard for the consequences. It is precisely the fact that the Suhua freeway plan was from the beginning motivated by political considerations that ensured it would not proceed smoothly. As things turned out, the Democratic Progressive Party won the presidential election, and the new government vacillated over whether to build the freeway or not. Political considerations continued to greatly outweigh professional ones.

In 2006, the Ministry of Transportation and Communications delivered an environmental impact assessment report to the EPA that said the route should be changed to avoid faults that might cause groundwater to seep or gush into tunnels. This route change had to be made precisely because not enough drill cores had been taken in the initial survey. Nevertheless, at the time, the only material presented for reference by the Taiwan Area National Expressway Engineering Bureau to a series of assessment committee meetings was the geological conditions the Taiwan Railways Administration encountered when it was digging the New Yongchun Tunnel (新永春隧道) for its North-Link Line. No thorough borehole survey was done for the road project, so the impact assessors could not be fully confident about the project and it was repeatedly delayed.

The 2008 presidential election saw the KMT regain power. The original idea of building a new road as an alternative to the Suhua Highway gave way to improving the existing roadway, and responsibility for planning the project was given to the Directorate General of Highways. In spite of these changes, the improvement project still faced the same problems as the earlier freeway plan in relation to route planning and geological challenges for sections of where long tunnels were needed.

From  TaipeiTimes ：http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/editorials/archives/2010/11/19/2003488859

Date: 2010/11/19  PM 16:10