More than 100 people, including residents of the Losheng (Happy Life) Sanatorium, supporters of its preservation as well as engineers, yesterday rallied outside the Control Yuan in Taipei and submitted a petition calling for a probe into the construction of a Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) maintenance depot that has allegedly led to landslides at the sanatorium site.
Shouting slogans urging the Department of Rapid Transit Systems (DORTS) to halt construction and holding placards that read “Losheng SOS,” the demonstraters rallied as their representatives entered the Control Yuan to submit the petition.
“We, the residents of Losheng, worry every day as we see the cracks in the walls grow bigger. We’ve petitioned the Taipei City Government and the Public Construction Commission several times, but we have never received any satisfactory responses from them,” Losheng Sanatorium Self-Help Organization chairwoman Chang Yun-ming (張雲明) told reporters.
Photo: Lo Pei-der, Taipei Times
“The DORTS always says it will do some reinforcement work to solve the problem, but whatever it does, cracks appear again as soon as construction [of the depot] restarts,” Chang said. “We’re worried that a massive landslide could occur after days of torrential rain.”
Civil engineer Wang Wei-min (王偉民) confirmed Chang’s concerns.
“According to DORTS information, the soil on the hill [on which the sanatorium is located] is constantly sliding,” he said. “A magnitude 4 earthquake or seven to eight days of … torrential rain could cause the hill to collapse under the current conditions.”
If such a massive landslide happens, “it would be a disaster for Losheng residents, Sinjhuang residents and MRT construction workers,” Wang said. “What I propose is that the department refill what has been dug up so far to gain more time to look at what went wrong and how the problem can be remedied.”
The Losheng Sanatorium, located in New Taipei City’s (新北市) Sinjhuang District (新莊), was completed in the 1930s to house people with Hansen’s disease (also known as leprosy) and isolate them from the outside world, as the disease was once believed to be highly contagious and incurable.
In 2002, the government decided to tear down the sanatorium complex to make way for an MRT station and maintenance depot. However, this decision was met with strong opposition from preservationists.
A compromise was struck in 2007 to preserve a small part of the original campus.
However, controversies surrounding the sanatorium continued as construction of the MRT station led to continuous small landslides and cracks forming in buildings.
Although the department allegedly repeatedly promised over the years that the problem could be solved by applying certain engineering techniques, this never happened. Construction was suspended several times in the past year as landslides seemed to occur more often and grew bigger.
Last week the department called another stop to construction at the station until the landslide problem could be solved once and for all.
Former chairpersons of the Association of Engineering Geologists also attended the protest to voice their support for the preservationists.
“As an engineering geologist, I was shocked when I saw the geological data for the Losheng Sanatorium and the engineering methods used by DORTS,” former chairman of the group Chen Kuo-hua (陳國華) said.
“To hold the sliding [soil] layer [in place], a ground anchor has to go through the sliding layer and the fault zone and be hammered into a more stable layer, such as the rock basin or a gravel layer — but this is not the case at the MRT station,” he said.
It is not surprising that landslides would continue to occur, since the ground anchors that DORTS is using are not long enough, Chen said.
“On the other hand, if the ground anchor is too long, it would not be as strong, so it must be specially made,” he said.
Control Yuan member Chen Yung-hsiang (陳永祥) accepted the petition and promised a probe, adding he would soon visit the site for an inspection.
DEEPER REVIEW: After receiving 19 hospital reports of suspected food poisoning, the Taipei Department of Health applied for an epidemiological investigation A buffet restaurant in Taipei’s Xinyi District (信義) is to be fined NT$3 million (US$91,233) after it remained opened despite an order to suspend operations following reports that 32 people had been treated for suspected food poisoning, the Taipei Department of Health said yesterday. The health department said it on Tuesday received reports from hospitals of people who had suspected food poisoning symptoms, including nausea, vomiting, stomach pain and diarrhea, after they ate at an INPARADISE (饗饗) branch in Breeze Xinyi on Sunday and Monday. As more than six people who ate at the restaurant sought medical treatment, the department ordered the
A strong continental cold air mass and abundant moisture bringing snow to mountains 3,000m and higher over the past few days are a reminder that more than 60 years ago Taiwan had an outdoor ski resort that gradually disappeared in part due to climate change. On Oct. 24, 2021, the National Development Council posted a series of photographs on Facebook recounting the days when Taiwan had a ski resort on Hehuanshan (合歡山) in Nantou County. More than 60 years ago, when developing a branch of the Central Cross-Island Highway, the government discovered that Hehuanshan, with an elevation of more than 3,100m,
Taiwan’s population last year shrank further and births continued to decline to a yearly low, the Ministry of the Interior announced today. The ministry published the 2024 population demographics statistics, highlighting record lows in births and bringing attention to Taiwan’s aging population. The nation’s population last year stood at 23,400,220, a decrease of 20,222 individuals compared to 2023. Last year, there were 134,856 births, representing a crude birth rate of 5.76 per 1,000 people, a slight decline from 2023’s 135,571 births and 5.81 crude birth rate. This decrease of 715 births resulted in a new record low per the ministry’s data. Since 2016, which saw
SECURITY: To protect the nation’s Internet cables, the navy should use buoys marking waters within 50m of them as a restricted zone, a former navy squadron commander said A Chinese cargo ship repeatedly intruded into Taiwan’s contiguous and sovereign waters for three months before allegedly damaging an undersea Internet cable off Kaohsiung, a Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) investigation revealed. Using publicly available information, the Liberty Times was able to reconstruct the Shunxing-39’s movements near Taiwan since Double Ten National Day last year. Taiwanese officials did not respond to the freighter’s intrusions until Friday last week, when the ship, registered in Cameroon and Tanzania, turned off its automatic identification system shortly before damage was inflicted to a key cable linking Taiwan to the rest of
RSS