雖有颱風要來，可是七日晚上八點回家，路面是乾的。回家後沒多久開始下雨，再過一段時間颳風。好吧，颱風夜就睡吧，沒甚麼。半夜醒，下雨刮風，颱風嘛，不以為意，繼續睡。老婆說清晨五點左右剛好醒，看到窗外亮亮一片，繼續睡。停電了，這也沒甚麼，颱風嘛，再睡。颱風到十點大體上已經過了，雖然還有幾陣風。看外面，幾棵樹斷了，地上水多，沒甚麼。唯一不尋常的是，風雨把紗窗洗乾淨了。
可是到中午還沒復電，就奇怪。午餐後，聽到前面溪水聲音大，出去看，到馬路才知道嚴重。柏油很多處被水沖壞、很多地方崩。問鄰居有沒有電？說，水淹到發電廠，發電廠爆了，沒電，外面路都斷了，沒電沒電話沒網路。也沒水：烏來的自來水，是自己找來的水，要自己找水源、排管子到自家的水塔；我們水塔很大，暫時沒問題，可是這要注意。(原來超看到的亮光，是發電廠爆炸的光。)
這個颱風從頭到尾才十二小時左右，下了一千多毫釐雨。山崩、路斷，八十歲的耆老沒看過這麼嚴重的災害。這也是托消費者的福，很喜歡來烏來泡溫泉，所以外面資金流進來，亂開發，破壞水流、擋住水流；反正烏來只是他們投資的點而已，生意不好就拍拍屁股到別地方去吧，管它烏來怎麼樣。
可是我們居民不是這麼認為的。
We were expecting a typhoon. The news on
the internet said it would be about as strong as Katrina, so I didn’t pay much
attention to it. We get several larger than Katrina in an average year.
Everything that can blow away, blew away long ago. We came home around eight on
the evening of the seventh. The roads were dry.
It started to rain soon after we got home,
and the wind came up to blow not much later. Ho hum, what better to do during a
typhoon than sleep? I woke up during the night, the wind was blowing and the
rain was raining, typical typhoon, back to sleep. Chao woke around first light
and saw a bright flash in the sky, like lightning. The power was out, but that’s
nothing unusual for a typhoon.
By ten in the morning, the typhoon had
pretty well passed, except for some gusts. Some trees had broken, there was
water everywhere, pretty much your typical typhoon. So far the only thing
atypical was that it washed our window screens. I didn’t even bother to pay attention
to the name of the typhoon, which was Soudelor.
After lunch, the power hadn’t come back on,
which was unusual. The phone was dead, the cellphones didn’t have any signal,
and we couldn’t go online. The stream out front seemed to be roaring especially
loud, so we decided to go ask the neighbors if they had electricity.
When we got down to the road, we realized
things were pretty bad. The road was all ripped up by the water. Neighbors told
us that the stream overflowed into the power plant, which blew up: thus the
flash Chao saw. There was no electricity, and the roads were all cut. Everybody’s
water was cut (we lay our own pipes from spring to home). There were big and
small slides everywhere. Wulai was out of touch with the outside world, even
the neighboring tribal villages.
The typhoon was not particularly big, but
it came all at once. Within about twelve hours, we got about four feet of rain.
Roads were cut, landslides were everywhere, the oldest tribal elders had never
seen such a mess in Wulai. For that, we have consumers to thank, people who
flock to Wulai for the hotsprings, drawing investors, who care only about
profits and nothing about local life. They built in places that cut off the
flow of water. That proved disastrous.
I will be posting photos on Flickr.
