Taiwan’s Prime Minister Lui Chao-shiuan and several cabinet members were the latest casualties Wednesday in the ongoing fallout from the much-criticized government response to Typhoon Morakot. The country’s feeble relief efforts following the August 7 storm and subsequent landslides have raised the ire of the Taiwanese and inspired some to call for the ouster of President Ma Ying-jeou and other officials.

Although Lui had been expected to stay on as Prime Minister, he surprised many with his resignation, according to an article in the New York Times.

“I believe because so many people died, someone must take responsibility,” Liu is quoted as saying in the article.

There’s plenty of responsibility to go around in the disaster, which killed an estimated 700 people. Government gaffes include failure to evacuate vulnerable areas, rejection of foreign aid, slow and lacking rescue efforts, and seeming callousness of public officials. The typhoon fiasco whipped up a political storm for the once-popular president.

“[Ma] and his government turned it into a political crisis because people think he didn't show enough compassion,” George Tsai, a political scientist at Chinese Culture University, told the Christian Science Monitor.

Officials have been lambasted for everything from attending parties and getting their hair dyed in the days following the typhoon to not deploying rescue teams to search for the missing, according to the China Post.

Some high level officials, such as the deputy foreign minister responsible for declining “all foreign aid but cash,” resigned immediately after the debacle, according to the Monitor. Others were replaced during a reorganization of the cabinet when it switched from Liu to his successor, Wu Den-yih, Thursday.

As more than one media outlet made parallels between the Morakot response and Hurricane Katrina, Ma has offered up apologies and promises of disciplinary action.

“There are things that we have to correct and we also will be responsible for whatever mistakes or neglect that government officials have made,” he stated in press conference shortly after the typhoon.

It’s unclear whether evacuation and other early warning systems weren’t activated or were ignored; however, Taiwan does have robust systems in place—a result of lessons learned in the 1999 Chi Chi Earthquake (Natural Hazard Workshop attendees can learn more here). According to National Taiwan University civil engineer Lin Mei-ling, an ongoing project is mapping areas where landslides are likely.

“It's difficult to fix every place—it's too expensive,” she told the Christian Science Monitor. "We've already developed a system to identify potentially hazardous areas."