The best way to ruin a place is to dump a pile of projects on it. Perhaps Orchid Island will be one such example in the future!

On 6/21 I went to Orchid Island, taking the boat together with a bunch of police officers. They were going to Dongqing for security duty, because the Taitung County Government wanted to set up a cement batching plant on Dongqing No. 7 plot, and residents had formed the Dongqing No. 7 Plot Self-Rescue Association to protest. Passengers filed off the boat one after another, and the originally narrow pier was piled with steel rebar, making the space feel even more cramped. Trucks carrying goods drove along, competing with pedestrians for the road, in one near-miss after another. It looked like Orchid Island really was in the middle of a construction boom, no wonder they wanted to build a cement batching plant, I muttered to myself.

Please allow me to digress and complain for a moment: searching for offshore island construction budgets over the years is really not easy. The website of the Council for Economic Planning and Development of the Executive Yuan only has the third phase, with no data for the first or second phases; the Taitung County Government website has data, but it is not complete either, and most of the data does not list the detailed plans for each year. Finally I found at this link the initial report of the fourth-phase offshore island construction plan. The report does list annual plans in detail, but the problem is that the file is a PDF, and when converted to a Word table everything breaks, so it cannot be used for Excel statistics, and I had to manually re-enter the data. The public sector does not do a good job of making information transparent; they even give out files as PDFs that cannot be easily processed. It is maddening. When I got to the <Taitung County Offshore Island Integrated Information Network Plan>, I thought, great, this plan has a dedicated website, so there should be detailed data. But I searched everywhere and could not find the "Taiwan Offshore Island Information Network http://www.isles.org.tw" written in the CEPD press release, and that website cost a total of 7.53 million to build from start to finish, yet now not even a ghost of it can be seen.

Engineering Construction, a Storm Is Brewing

Did you think that was the end of it? In June of year 100 of the Republic of China, the President promulgated the Hualien-Taitung Area Development Act, and the Taitung County Government drafted the Orchid Island Special Area Plan (within the Taitung County Comprehensive Development Implementation Plan). What exactly will Orchid Island develop into? I dare not imagine! Apart from oversight by all citizens, the islanders themselves must also have their own ideas, and only then will things look a bit more optimistic.

[Further Reading]

* The Forgotten Island (5 parts in total; this was written by Yang Du, a very profound observation.) (Link no longer works 2014/9/15)

*"Taitung County Fourth Phase (104-107) Offshore Island Comprehensive Construction Implementation Plan" commissioned planning case - revised final report (Ministry of Transportation and Communications, month of year 103)

*Island of People, Still Meridaka (Indigenous Television)

[Related Links]

* Save Orchid Island Wild Streams Alliance blog

* Save Orchid Island Wild Streams Alliance Facebook

* Orchid Island Tribal Culture Foundation Facebook