After days of torrential rain caused disaster in Pingtung, County Magistrate Chou Chun-mi accompanied Premier Cho Jung-tai on an inspection of the damage, pointing the finger for inadequate flood control at cuts to the central government budget — bad news for both disaster victims and local government.

• Pingtung's cumulative rainfall over five days topped 1,300 millimetres in mountain areas and neared 1,000 millimetres on the plains, more than half the annual average.
• Chou Chun-mi called on legislators to stop cutting the budget, stressing that Pingtung is criss-crossed by rivers and that flood control depends on funding from the central government.
• The Xinghuabu levee in Wandan has been criticised as a "shoddy" project; the county government said June's rainfall exceeded the design standard set more than a decade ago, and that the reconstruction work will be awarded on 1 September.
• Kuomintang legislator Su Ching-chuan said the levee has breached three times in five years, with no steel reinforcement inside and only sand and soil beneath, and that Pingtung produced work of this quality despite receiving the fifth-highest flood-control funding in Taiwan.
• The county government's Water Resources Department explained that three consecutive days of heavy rain saturated the soil and reduced its strength, and that water scoured out the ground beneath the embankment, causing the temporary sandbags to subside and shift.

Outlook: Construction will begin as soon as the reconstruction contract is awarded, but the political wrangling over levee quality and the flood-control budget will not stop any time soon.