Taiwan troops clear Champi storm damage as aviation officials ask for military flights

Taiwanese troops moved into storm-hit districts of northern Taiwan on Saturday to clear roads and help with clean-up after Tropical Storm Champi, while the island's civil aviation regulator said it had asked the armed forces for aircraft to help move travellers stranded on outlying islands. The Third Theater Command, which is responsible for the defence of northern Taiwan, said it had sent relief troops and machinery to seven townships and districts in New Taipei and Yilan County at the request of local governments.

According to the command, strong winds and heavy rain had brought down roadside trees and blocked roads in parts of both areas, disrupting travel and posing safety risks for residents. Its soldiers were assigned to remove road obstructions, clean up debris and support wider recovery work so that traffic and normal life could resume as quickly as possible. The command said it would keep tracking the weather and reported damage through its disaster-response systems and would commit further personnel and equipment as local authorities requested.

The recovery work followed several days of preparation. The military newspaper Youth Daily News reported on Saturday morning that the army's disaster-response centre had been raised to its highest level, with more than 10,000 personnel organised and over 6,000 items of equipment, including loaders, water pumps and generators, readied for use. In New Taipei, units of the Third Theater Command were pre-positioned in Ruifang and Shuangxi and helped district officials carry out precautionary evacuations from areas at risk of landslides and flooding. In the east, combat engineers under the Second Theater Command tested loaders and multi-purpose engineering vehicles and inflated rubber boats so they would be ready for rescue tasks.

The storm also grounded much of Taiwan's domestic air network. The Civil Aviation Administration said domestic flights had been suspended progressively from Thursday morning and halted entirely on Friday before services resumed on Saturday afternoon. As of 6 pm on Saturday, 159 domestic flights had still been cancelled and 20 delayed. The agency said it had arranged 25 extra or larger-aircraft flights, 17 on Penghu routes and eight on Kinmen routes, offering 2,251 seats, but some travellers on both island groups still could not get seats after two days without flights.

The regulator said it had asked the military for support and hoped military aircraft could help carry passengers on Sunday and Monday, provided the weather allowed and the flights did not interfere with combat readiness duties. The report did not say whether the defence ministry had agreed or how many aircraft might be made available.

Champi killed one person and injured 616 after it began affecting Taiwan on Thursday as a typhoon, the Central Emergency Operation Center said on Saturday evening. The death was a man swept away by waves on a beach in Liuqiu Township in Pingtung County. The centre received 9,027 damage reports, including 3,287 involving fallen trees, and said more than 340,000 households had lost power at some point. A total of 4,960 people had been evacuated as a precaution against landslides, and Yilan County recorded 650 millimetres of rain from Thursday through Saturday afternoon, the highest total in the country.

Disaster relief is a standing task for Taiwan's armed forces, and the request for military airlift shows how civil authorities turn to the same units whose primary mission is defence when weather cuts transport links to the outlying islands. The aviation agency's condition that any flights must not affect readiness duties reflects the balance the military has to strike between supporting the public after a storm and keeping forces available for operational tasks.