Minister of Economic Affairs Wang Mei-hua (王美花): This is undoubtedly the most serious drought since 1967. We usually get an average of more than 100mm of spring rain, but so far this year, we only had 20mm.

The latest report says the Deji Reservoir in Taichung is at 10.19 percent of capacity.

Floods are going strong. In Taiwan they'd probably call the system a taifeng - it's a couple of low pressures circulating. Because Australia is so flat they've managed to come onshore off the north west coast and make their way 4000 km across deserts to the mountains of the east coast where they're dropping the rain.

Record totals in many places. A few around the 1000mm for the 4-day journey. No lives lost - lots of houses flooded.

Today should be the last day. Action now appears to be south east Qld/northern NSW as well as down around Canberra nearly 2000 km to the south - so it's a big storm.

Improper soil accumulation suspected of leading to Japan mudslide

It reads like this illegal soil placement did not just contribute to the deadly landslide, it caused it.

When I first read about this "soil accumulation", I pictured a few little piles of soil, a few dump truck loads. A quick search tells me that a dump truck can hold between 7-14 cubic meters. Let's be generous and call it an even 15.

Local authorities say an estimated 54,000 cubic meters of soil which had been brought to a mountainside by a real estate management firm exacerbated the massive mudslide on July 3 in Atami, Shizuoka Prefecture, resulting in the deaths of nine people confirmed as of Friday.

54,000 cubic meters! That's over, probably well over 3,600 dump truck loads.

For instance, the company had reported in 2009 its plan to pile up soil at the lot to a height of 15 meters, but the actual height of the soil reached some 50 meters shortly before the mudslide occurred, according to the prefectural government.

A 50 meter tall pile of loose soil? 50 meters? That's enormous.

Some 56,000 cubic meters of soil in total, mostly the soil left by the company, collapsed into a nearby river, traveling a distance of about 2 kilometers. Around 130 houses and buildings were destroyed or damaged.

They know it was from the illegally stored soil because --

Koyama, who conducted an on-site investigation on Monday, said in his report that the soil which triggered the mudslide did not include volcanic rocks naturally seen in the area but consisted mainly of small stones mixed with sand, indicating it had been brought in from outside.

He also concluded that as there were no large volcanic rocks found in the disaster-hit areas, the mudslide derived solely from the accumulated soil.

But there's more, as if this could get any worse --

The real estate management firm based in nearby Odawara in Kanagawa Prefecture, which acquired the mountainside lot in 2006, brought in soil exceeding the amount it reported to the local authority and also mixed industrial waste with it, according to the Shizuoka Prefectural Government.

What sort of industrial waste? Could this have been a project not to construct buildings, but to illegally dispose of toxic industrial waste, waste that now covers a town?

This has organized crime written all over it, and corruption. But the main point is, this was not a natural catastrophe. It was man-made.

It's now been several years since Taiwan has had a substantial typhoon. I can remember going two seasons without one but not this long. In that time there have been a few going up to Japan and a couple to Philippines but guessing an overall decline.

There seems to be plenty of Hurricanes about - the US has had two big years in a row - but something is going on in the north west pacific.