Southern Taiwan was rocked by a magnitude 5.2 earthquake at 4:51am yesterday.
Central Weather Bureau (CWB) data showed that the quake occured in Kaohsiung’s Liouguei District (六龜) 16.5km below ground.
The greatest intensity generated by the earthquake was a local intensity of 5 in Pintung County’s Sandimen Township (三地門).
A local intensity of 3 was detected in Kaohsiung and Tainan as well as in Pingtung and Taitung counties.
The earthquake was followed by magnitude 3.6 and magnitude 4.6 aftershocks.
CWB Seismology Center Director Kuo Kai-wen (郭鎧紋) said that the epicenter was located near the Chaochou Fault (潮州斷層), which is a north-south fault line of about 85km between Kaohsiung and Pingtung.
However, he said the earthquake was not caused by a movement of the fault.
“If the earthquake were caused by the movement of the fault, the depth of the hypocenter would be about 10km. The earthquake’s hypocenter was about 16.5km underground and could not have been caused by the fault,” he said.
Kuo said that earthquakes have been happening quite frequently in southern Taiwan following the earthquake in Tainan’s Jiasian District (甲仙) on March 4, 2010.
He said the hypocenter of yesterday’s earthquake was on the same earthquake belt as the earthquake in Jiasian as well as the one in Kaohsiung’s Meinong (美濃) in February.
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