The rate of drownings here is incredible. I’m surprised that drowning doesn’t make it into the top ten causes of death in Taiwan, in a category by itself (rather than lumped together with other “accidents”).
Over the years, there have been dozens of drownings in the places where I regularly go swimming. I can hardly think of any spot along my favourite streams where there hasn’t been at least one drowning in the last decade or so. I’ve given up being superstitious and worrying about being pulled under by the spirit of one of the deceased, even in the ghost month: if one worried about that, one would never be able to go swimming anywhere in Taiwan.
Popular streams, where lots of people go to barbecue and mess around in the water in the summer, usually claim a clutch of victims year after year, no matter how many voluntary lifeguards are on duty there. For example, there’s one in Sansia (the name of which has slipped my memory) which features in countless reports of drownings in the Chinese press, though such tragedies are seldom if ever deemed newsworthy enough to get a mention in the English newspapers. If you multiply the toll there by the number of such places around Taiwan, the total must be quite staggering – though I’ve never seen any official statistics on the number of drownings nationwide.
A few years ago, I read a report about the number of people who had drowned in Bitan over the preceding decade, but the figure was so extraordinarily high – up in the hundreds – that I felt sure it must have been erroneous. Though many of the drownings there, of course, were people who committed suicide by jumping off the bridge, so the huge number cited could just possibly be true.
And it’s not only the poor swimming ability, stupidity or suicidal intent of the victims that results in their drowning. There was a notorious case some time back of a party of school kids who were swept away and drowned when some bright spark opened a dam upstream without proper warning. Such negligence is by no means uncommon, and I experienced it myself one time at Wulai: I was swimming in the Tonghou Stream when I noticed that the water was rising very quickly, so I swam to the bank and got out as fast as I could. I was the only one in the water there at the time (it wasn’t a weekend or in the summer holidays), but there was also a young couple who had crossed the river and were trapped on the other side. With darkness not far away, I told them to stay put, hurried off to the nearest police substation to report their plight, and returned with the policeman to help them get across with a rope (the guy was scared shitless and shaking like a leaf, which prompted the policeman to rib him mercilously). Again, that could so easily have ended up as yet another tragic loss of life.
Surely it’s not as bad as this anywhere else in the world, is it?
hope springs eternal… I for one can’t wait to see if they do…