A 21-year-old woman died yesterday of severe burns and complications five months after she was injured in the Color Play Asia disaster at the Formosa Fun Coast (八仙海岸) water park in New Taipei City’s Bali District (八里).
Wu Wen-chi’s (吳玟錡) death brings the toll from the June 27 fire to 15, with most of the people killed aged in their early 20s.
Wu, one of more than 500 victims of the fire, suffered burns to 87.5 percent of her body and had skin and tissue surgery the day after she was injured, the Taipei Veterans General Hospital said.
However, over the past five months she developed multiple complications, including septic shock and acute respiratory distress syndrome, the hospital said.
On Aug. 15 Wu was placed on extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, a machine that functions like an artificial lung, the hospital said.
Doctors performed cardiac surgery on Saturday after the patient went into heart failure, but she subsequently suffered septic shock and multiple organ failure, the hospital said.
Wu was released from hospital in critical condition at 2:30am yesterday and died at 3:36am at her home after an endotracheal tube was removed, the hospital said.
She was the 15th person to have died since the June 27 incident at the water park.
A fire erupted when colored cornstarch powder that was being used for party effects ignited. About 500 people, most of them in their teens and early 20s, were injured in the fire.
Taipei Veterans General Hospital said it had treated 43 people, six of whom had sustained burns to more than 80 percent of their bodies. Six of the 43 burns victims are still hospitalized, but are improving, the hospital said.
The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday said it is fully aware of the situation following reports that the son of ousted Chinese politician Bo Xilai (薄熙來) has arrived in Taiwan and is to marry a Taiwanese. Local media reported that Bo Guagua (薄瓜瓜), son of the former member of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, is to marry the granddaughter of Luodong Poh-Ai Hospital founder Hsu Wen-cheng (許文政). The pair met when studying abroad and arranged to get married this year, with the wedding breakfast to be held at The One holiday resort in Hsinchu
The Taipei Zoo on Saturday said it would pursue legal action against a man who was filmed climbing over a railing to tease and feed spotted hyenas in their enclosure earlier that day. In videos uploaded to social media on Saturday, a man can be seen climbing over a protective railing and approaching a ledge above the zoo’s spotted hyena enclosure, before dropping unidentified objects down to two of the animals. The Taipei Zoo in a statement said the man’s actions were “extremely inappropriate and even illegal.” In addition to monitoring the hyenas’ health, the zoo would collect evidence provided by the public
A decision to describe a Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs statement on Singapore’s Taiwan policy as “erroneous” was made because the city-state has its own “one China policy” and has not followed Beijing’s “one China principle,” Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Tien Chung-kwang (田中光) said yesterday. It has been a longstanding practice for the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to speak on other countries’ behalf concerning Taiwan, Tien said. The latest example was a statement issued by the PRC after a meeting between Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財) and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on the sidelines of the APEC summit
A road safety advocacy group yesterday called for reforms to the driver licensing and retraining system after a pedestrian was killed and 15 other people were injured in a two-bus collision in Taipei. “Taiwan’s driver’s licenses are among the easiest to obtain in the world, and there is no mandatory retraining system for drivers,” Taiwan Vision Zero Alliance, a group pushing to reduce pedestrian fatalities, said in a news release. Under the regulations, people who have held a standard car driver’s license for two years and have completed a driver training course are eligible to take a test
RSS