Enhancing Local Disaster Management Network through Developing Resilient Community in New Taipei City, Taiwan.

Large-scaled disaster events had increasingly occurred worldwide due to global and environmental change. Evidently, disaster response cannot rely merely on the public force. In the golden hour of crisis, not only the individuals should learn to react, protect themselves, and try to help each other, but also the local school, enterprise, non-government organization (NGO), nonprofit organization (NPO), and volunteer groups should collaborate to effectively deal with disaster events. New Taipei City (NTPC), Taiwan, was aware of the need for non-public force response and therefore developed the process of enhancing local disaster management networks through promoting the resilient community since 2009. The concept of a resilient community is to build community-based capacity for mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery in an all-hazards manner. This study organized the NTPC experience and presented the standard operation procedure (SOP) to promote the resilient community, key obstacles, maintenance mechanism, and the successful formulation of the local disaster management network. The performance of the promotion was evaluated through a questionnaire survey and found that participants affirmed the positive effect of building community capacity through the entire process. In general, the resilient community as the center of the local disaster management work is shown promising to holistically bridge the inner/outer resources and systematically respond to disaster events.

Mapping of spatial multi-scale sources of arsenic variation in groundwater on ChiaNan floodplain of Taiwan.

This study applied multivariate factorial kriging to derive the characteristics of the spatial variations of groundwater arsenic distributions at different scales on the ChiaNan floodplain, Taiwan. Seven variables (dissolved oxygen, oxidation-reduction potential, alkalinity, sulfate, iron cations, manganese cations and total organic carbon) and Arsenic were adopted to analyze the mechanisms of arsenic enrichments in groundwater. The hydrogeological environment had spatial and quantitative influences on arsenic enrichments at different scales. The regional scale was set to 32 km referring to the extension distance of flow paths to reflect the effects of flushing in the aquifer, while the local scale was set to 16 km referring to the farthest distance of seawater intrusion to determine the influence of seawater intrusion. The results of factorial kriging suggested that arsenic releases resulted partially from pyrite oxidation during the flushing at the regional scale and partially due to the siderite dissolution at the local scale. Overall, the alkalinity dominated arsenic distribution in groundwater at both the regional and local scales. The multivariate factorial kriging results also demonstrated that seawater intrusion slightly affected the increase of arsenic in groundwater, accounting for only 17.3% of total variation. However, the interaction of seawater intrusion and arsenic distribution in space indicated that seawater intrusion restrained the distribution of arsenic from the areas where seawater was located. High dissolved oxygen was found at where over-pumping induced drawdown cones occurred and also limited the spatial variation of arsenic. Our findings indicate that multivariate factorial kriging can be a useful mapping tool to improve understanding of the mechanism of arsenic release in groundwater at different scales. And the results conducted from the application of multivariate factorial kriging in southwestern Taiwan reveal the important influences of the hydrogeological processes, either artificial or natural, on the arsenic variations in groundwater.