Alton Thompson has a post on Typhoon Morakot disaster relief information. I highly recommend anyone looking for information on how to help to check out this post.

Typhoon Morakot has really hammered Taiwan and at least one entire village appears to have been completely submerged in mud. Apparently the response has been slow so far.

I experienced low-grade Typhoon Kalmaegi last summer in Taiwan and it was an awesome sight – here’s a photo (best viewed large to get an idea of how much water is coming down). Whole fields and neighborhoods were flooded and people were using boats to get around, rivers were swollen beyond their banks, and there were cars stuck in water everywhere. I rode the high speed rail during the tail end of the storm and got a good look of everything from Kaohsiung to Taoyuan, and it looked like the flooding was nearly complete for the entire distance of the trip! For this past typhoon, it was the most precipitation they had in 50 years, and parts of Taiwan received an entire year’s worth of rainfall in two days. It rains a lot in Taiwan already, so imagine all the rain in a semi-tropical Pacific island location just dumping over the course of 48 hours. It’s hard to imagine how much worse this one was compared to the little sprinkle I experienced last year. Might as well put the place underneath a waterfall. I hope the affected areas can recover quickly…