Invited by the Council of Indigenous Peoples, Water Resources and Environmental Engineering Associate Professor Fu-kuo Huang participated in the safety appraisals of the Typhoon Morakot disaster. He went to Daren Township and Dawu Township in Taitung County to inspect the seriousness of the disaster, and he cooperated with the Morakot Post-Disaster Reconstruction Council, Executive Yuan, to take part in the meeting to explain the destructive situation and offer the indigenous peoples their professional analyses that would be evidence for migration or reconstruction.

Prof. Huang said that the coordinator for the inspection was Geography Professor Hong-yu Chen from Taiwan University. Led by him, some engineering advisers and academic experts conducted the post-disaster appraisals and evaluations. According to their appraisals, they divided the 64 tribes into 3 categories: Safe, Unsafe and Partially Safe for the government to decide future reconstructions or migrations. He explained that many local people did not want to migrate because of deep feelings towards their home environments or difficulties in making a living. So in their appraisals and evaluations, they considered not only the engineering factors, but also the human, cultural and topographical factors.

Prof. Huang has taken part in many disaster inspections such as the 921 earthquake inspection. All the examples of such inspections have become his teaching or reference materials for students. He said, “In academic teaching, there are not many real examples like those. Through them, I can train students to ponder on, examine and solve related problems in different ways, and at the same time I also consider it as my social responsibility to make some contributions to society.” ( ~Dean X. Wang )