Dinda Laksita was brought down by cable from the roof of a community hall in Hualien County on 12 October, as muddy water coursed through the road below. The 56-year-old interpreter had spent the afternoon helping residents understand evacuation messages before the swollen stream cut off her route home. Rescuers reached her shortly before nightfall.
Rain gauges recorded 286 millimetres (11.3 inches) in nine hours in the surrounding hills, according to the county emergency office. Dinda had climbed onto the hall roof after water entered its ground floor. “I could hear the rescue team, but I could not tell where they were coming from,” she said. A dispatcher used her location message to guide the crew through the flooded settlement.
A warning in two languages
Dinda, who moved to Taiwan from Indonesia in 2004, works part-time at a free legal-aid desk in Hualien. She translates Mandarin notices into Bahasa Indonesia for migrant workers and long-term residents who struggle to follow official wording. On 12 October, she was carrying printed storm guidance to several households when rising water blocked her way back.
Her work on emergency warnings began with a legal-aid case in 2024. Dinda and two other residents challenged the handling of a relocation-grant application after Indonesian-speaking households said they had not understood an earlier evacuation notice. The district court did not grant every request, but its written decision criticised agencies for treating a Mandarin-only warning as adequate for residents known to need translation.
The judge’s comments helped prompt a county pilot for short emergency notices in Indonesian as well as Mandarin. Dinda now checks translations before they are circulated through phone alerts and village loudspeakers. The rescue dispatcher told her team that the bilingual notice had helped them identify which households had received the warning and which routes they were likely to use.
From case file to rescue
“I never thought the words we argued over in court would help someone find me on a roof,” Dinda said. Valentín Muñiz, a rescue coordinator, said the translated alert gave crews a clearer account of where residents had gone after leaving their homes. He said the team reached the hall using Dinda’s location message and local route information, not the alert alone.
The storm damaged two small bridges and forced the temporary closure of a mountain road, according to the county office. No deaths were reported in Dinda’s district. The administration said it would review how quickly translated warnings reached outlying settlements and whether more loudspeakers could be linked to the same alert channel.
Isioma Motalo, who coordinates the legal-aid desk, said Dinda returned to work on Wednesday and had already asked for the storm notice to be revised. “She wanted the next version to say plainly where people should wait if roads are cut,” Motalo said. For Dinda, the rescue has become another reason to insist that a warning must be understandable before the water rises.
