A land alert might be announced today for Tropical Storm Danas, which is to bring extremely heavy rain to eastern and southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Bureau said yesterday.
Danas formed at 2pm yesterday about 730km southeast of Oluanpi (鵝鑾鼻), and was moving west at 11kph with a radius of 150km, bureau data showed.
Its structure solidified over the day and a weakening Pacific high-pressure system is pushing the storm north, bureau forecaster Chen Yi-hsiu (陳依秀) said.
Photo: Screen grab from the Internet
The bureau said it was likely to issue a sea alert by 11:30pm yesterday.
“It is possible that we will issue a land alert during the day on Wednesday, but it depends on whether the storm moves toward the east coast or the west coast,” she said.
Based on the bureau’s projected path, Danas is to approach southeastern Taiwan at 2pm tomorrow and move across the nation on Friday, before heading toward China’s southeast coast.
Nevertheless, Hualien and Taitung counties could start seeing rain today, while chances of rain would be high nationwide tomorrow and on Friday, Chen said.
Rainfall in Hualien, Taitung, and Pingtung counties could exceed 200mm, which according to the bureau’s classification is “extremely heavy,” while central Taiwan could expect heavy rain, Chen said.
Although rain is expected to ease on Friday, the humidity brought by the storm would continue to affect the south and southwest over the weekend, she said.
Wind speeds on the outlying islands, including Orchid Island (Lanyu, 蘭嶼) and Green Island (綠島), as well as Penghu, Kinmen and Lienchiang counties, is forecast to reach level 9 or level 10 on the Beaufort scale, Chen added.
The Maritime Port Bureau said that 12 shipping services between Taiwan proper and the nation’s outlying islands, as well as four shipping services from Kinmen and Matsu to China’s Fujian Province, would be canceled until tomorrow.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,