Abstract
Typhoon No.8 (Morakot) that hit the middle-southern part of Taiwan on August 6-11, 2009 caused a large number of deaths and flooding there before it passed by. The most severe damage occurred in two Provinces of Xiaolin Cun and Shenmu Cun, in Kaohsiung County and Nantou cunty respectively. In Xiaolin-Cun the flooding triggered by the heavy rainfall swept away an elementary school.
It is not doubt that violent downpour whose probability of the same scale of rainfall is one in 200 years became the immediate cause of the floods and debris disasters.
The region's vulnerability to those calamities however was due to the colluvium layers which thickly cover a wide area of the mountainslopes and to the geomorphological characteristics of the terrain, at which the devastated villages and the elementary school were located on low terraces at a relative height of 5m above the recent riverbed.
