Workers repairs a broken bridge at Hsiaolin Village, Kaohsiung county yesterday. CNA

TAIPEI: Soldiers scraped mud from houses under the scorching sun and piled sand bags on the river bank in case floods return as Taiwan took its first steps toward recovery after Typhoon Morakot.

As the government ordered an all-out effort to help typhoon survivors rebuild their homes after floods and mudslides, here on the bank of the Chiwei River the massive reconstruction challenges are clear.

Despite the army's round-the-clock effort, the town of Chishan, in southern Kaohsiung county, one of the worst hit areas, remains an expanse of grey mud.

"The soldiers were told to clean up this place in a few days," one resident said, surveying the damage.

"It's going to be a challenge."

The floods and mudslides damaged more than 136,400 households, according to emergency officials.

"Premier" Liu Chao-shiuan said those left homeless would be temporarily resettled in military barracks, prefabricated homes or given subsidies to find their own accommodation.

One of the first prefabricated house projects was likely to be ready within three months in hard-hit southeastern Taitung county, Liu told reporters, adding 70 percent of aid applicants had said they preferred housing subsidies.

Taiwan leader Ma Ying-jeou has promised the people of Hsiaolin that their village, which has become an island symbol of the devastation, will be rebuilt within three years.

But an immediate dilemma in Hsiaolin, and elsewhere, is whether the government should continue pouring resources into recovering up to hundreds of bodies believed to be buried in mud up to five storeys deep.

The official death toll is more than 140, but Ma has warned it could climb to more than 500.

But it's more luck than skill to find a corpse buried between 3-10 meters under the mud and rocks. Soldiers had resorted to sniff the ground to detect odor from dead bodies.

"It is often an aimless search," said Lee Hsi-hsien, a government officer responsible for burying typhoon victims at a makeshift rescue center in Chishan.

"Even if we use satellite technology to assist the search, the bodies often have been washed away to another spot by the time rescuers go deep enough."

More than a week after the disaster, staff at the temporary morgue said they had managed only to prepare a few dozen badly damaged corpses for the identification stage after they were dug up.

In many cases, the force of floods and mudslides meant only limbs could be recovered, Lee said.

Police have asked relatives whose loved ones are missing to provide DNA samples to help speed up identification.

Most of the typhoon's victims are member of Taiwan's indigenous tribes who lived here for thousands of years before the Han Chinese came in the 17th century.

Because of their deep spiritual attachment to the land, more than 10,000 have refused to leave devastated areas despite mudslides having cut them off from the outside world.

The army has been airlifting food and water to holdouts at great expense.

Danubak Matalaq, an aboriginal rights activist, said he feared indigenous people faced months with no source of income while their mountain villages were rebuilt.

Authorities needed to avoid a repeat of the experience following Taiwan's 1999 earthquake when aborigines were only given temporary employment that lasted for only one to two months, Matalaq said.

"The government must ensure that these people will have reasonable job prospects until they can return to the mountains," he said, adding that education should also be provided to the children in the meantime.

A poorly-planned resettlement would only accelerate the tribes' decline, he warned.

AFP

(HK Edition 08/21/2009 page2)