Ma made the remarks while meeting with senior presidential advisers residing in areas hardest hit by Morakot-triggered massive flooding and landslides, to solicit their opinions about post-disaster reconstruction and rehabilitation.

Before Typhoon Morakot battered Taiwan on Aug. 8, disaster response officials had worked with some township chiefs in evacuating some 9,100 people from areas vulnerable to flooding and mudslides, Ma said, adding that such efforts had helped reduce the storm's human casualties.

"Otherwise, the typhoon's death toll could have been well over 1,000," Ma said.

However, in other areas, people who should have been evacuated were not, including the village of Siaolin in Kaohsiung County where more than 400 people were buried by a massive landslide triggered by the typhoon's heavy rain.

Altogether, the storm claimed more than 600 lives and left over 70 others missing and feared dead in Taiwan.

The government's slow and inefficient response in the early stages - including not dispatching troops right away - sparked public anger and eventually led to the Ma administration's first major Cabinet reshuffle earlier this month, in which the premier, vice premier and several key ministers were replaced.

Since the disaster, Ma said he has made more than 60 trips to disaster zones and met with surviving victims on numerous occasions to hear their opinions about how to improve Taiwan's disaster prevention and response mechanism.

"I'm deeply grieved by the loss of so many lives --- but crisis means opportunity. If we remember this bitter lesson and redouble efforts to hone disaster response strategies and update overall operational mechanism, I think we will be able to avoid similar woes in the future," Ma said.

He said the Ministry of the Interior is reviewing the current disaster response system and will come up with a comprehensive improvement package soon.

"An interministerial task force is also assessing 43 villages considered dangerous for human habitation and will decide soon whether to relocate residents there to safer areas," Ma added.

Several senior officials, including Interior Minister Jiang Yi-hua, Economic Affairs Minister Shih Yen-shiang and Tsai Shun-shiuang, chairman of the Council for Economic Planning and Development, were present at the meeting Wednesday.

(By Sofia Wu)