A foreign oil tanker ran aground off Pingtung County late on Saturday, but at the moment poses no threat of an oil spill, the Pingtung County Environmental Protection Bureau said yesterday.
The Colombo Queen, a 497-tonne oil tanker registered in the Union of Comoros, an island nation in the Indian Ocean, went aground about 50m off Pingtung’s scenic Jialeshuei coastal park amid strong winds and high seas whipped up by approaching Tropical Storm Linfa.
The National Rescue Command Center said the tanker, which was carrying 39,000 liters of fuel oil and nine crew members, sent out distress signals at about 8pm on Saturday.
PHOTO: TSAI TSUNG-HSIEN, TAIPEI TIMES
The command center alerted rescue teams in Kaohsiung and Pingtung, but rescue helicopters in those two counties were unable to fly because of the bad weather.
STRANDED
It then called a Coast Guard Administration (CGA) unit in Taitung County, where winds and waves were lighter because the tropical storm was sweeping toward the Taiwan Strait to the west of Taiwan.
Upon reaching the area in the early hours yesterday, the CGA patrol boat found the stranded oil tanker but could not spot any of the crew, who had abandoned ship in pitch darkness.
The patrol boat itself was taking a heavy pounding, but just before it gave up the search, a bolt of lightning struck, providing a flash of light that was enough for the rescuers to spot a life raft with all nine men aboard, about 5.5km from the grounded tanker, a CGA official said.
Aung Win, the Burmese captain of the Colombo Queen, said he had tried to steer the tanker away from the coast but the winds were so strong that the vessel was blown toward shore and the engine finally gave out.
“Thank Taiwan and thank Allah,” Aung Win said.
Meanwhile, in Pingtung, county officials were meeting over fears that the stranded tanker might cause an ecological calamity to the Pingtung coast similar to a disastrous oil spill in January 2001, when the Greek-registered bulk carrier Amorgos ran aground off the coast of Pingtung’s Kenting National Park, spilling roughly 1,150 tonnes of fuel oil into the water.
Fears
Three kilometers of coastline, from the Lungkeng Ecological Preserve to the rocky cliffs at Oluanpi, were seriously polluted.
The ensuing clean-up work among the coral reefs, carried out be local residents and 1,600 military personnel, was extremely difficult and it took six years for the 60-hectare Lungkeng Ecological Preserve to recover, as well as years of fighting in international courts for Taiwan to get any compensation.
An essay competition jointly organized by a local writing society and a publisher affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) might have contravened the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例), the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said on Thursday. “In this case, the partner organization is clearly an agency under the CCP’s Fujian Provincial Committee,” MAC Deputy Minister and spokesperson Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑) said at a news briefing in Taipei. “It also involves bringing Taiwanese students to China with all-expenses-paid arrangements to attend award ceremonies and camps,” Liang said. Those two “characteristics” are typically sufficient
A magnitude 5.9 earthquake that struck about 33km off the coast of Hualien City was the "main shock" in a series of quakes in the area, with aftershocks expected over the next three days, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Prior to the magnitude 5.9 quake shaking most of Taiwan at 6:53pm yesterday, six other earthquakes stronger than a magnitude of 4, starting with a magnitude 5.5 quake at 6:09pm, occurred in the area. CWA Seismological Center Director Wu Chien-fu (吳健富) confirmed that the quakes were all part of the same series and that the magnitude 5.5 temblor was
The brilliant blue waters, thick foliage and bucolic atmosphere on this seemingly idyllic archipelago deep in the Pacific Ocean belie the key role it now plays in a titanic geopolitical struggle. Palau is again on the front line as China, and the US and its allies prepare their forces in an intensifying contest for control over the Asia-Pacific region. The democratic nation of just 17,000 people hosts US-controlled airstrips and soon-to-be-completed radar installations that the US military describes as “critical” to monitoring vast swathes of water and airspace. It is also a key piece of the second island chain, a string of
The Central Weather Administration has issued a heat alert for southeastern Taiwan, warning of temperatures as high as 36°C today, while alerting some coastal areas of strong winds later in the day. Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門) and Pingtung County’s Neipu Township (內埔) are under an orange heat alert, which warns of temperatures as high as 36°C for three consecutive days, the CWA said, citing southwest winds. The heat would also extend to Tainan’s Nansi (楠西) and Yujing (玉井) districts, as well as Pingtung’s Gaoshu (高樹), Yanpu (鹽埔) and Majia (瑪家) townships, it said, forecasting highs of up to 36°C in those areas
RSS