Heavy rain brought by Typhoon Nesat over the weekend left a trail of destroyed property in northern Taiwan. Losses from natural disasters are expected, but the circumstances that led to vehicles being swamped after floodgates near Bailing Bridge (百齡橋) in Taipei’s Shilin District (士林) were closed have prompted criticism.
Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) called for improvements to integrated warning and public messaging systems, but added: “Each citizen should take responsibility for their own behavior” when asked why vehicles had not been moved after warning messages were sent.
City councilors and legislators said that owners of the vehicles had not been notified early enough, while about a dozen workers at a canceled music festival were on the riverside when the floodgates were closed.
Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Michelle Lin (林楚茵) said that the Taipei City Government only messaged the vehicle owners via Line on Sunday after the floodgates were shut at 4pm. Others said that there was a message at 3:55pm, which would still have been too late.
New Power Party Taipei City Councilor Meredith Huang (黃郁芬) on Monday wrote online that the festival contractors only received a message after the gates were shut.
However, Ko said that the city’s Parking Management and Development Office had sent four text messages to vehicle owners, with the first on Sunday morning, and that the Hydraulic Engineering Office notified the contractor in advance that the floodgates would be closed.
The people who did not heed the notifications need to take responsibility, he said.
“We need to establish a culture where you must run as soon as you see the messages,” he said.
While reports showed that the city sent messages throughout the day reminding people to make sure their vehicles were safe and borough wardens broadcast similar messages over loudspeakers, independent Taipei City Councilor Chiu Wei-chieh (邱威傑) said the earlier messages only mentioned the floodgates along the Tamsui River (淡水河), not the Keelung River (基隆河), where the vehicles were stuck.
When they mentioned the Keelung River at 3:55pm, it was already too late, Chiu said.
Ko was defiant when criticized for not being in Taipei during the storm, saying that there are standard disaster response procedures and that officials are able to execute their duties without his supervision.
However, this was hardly a “standard” situation, as the Keelung River rose quickly and there was no time to do things by the book — which includes notifying the public of floodgate closures six hours in advance and towing vehicles two hours before they shut.
An investigation should be launched into the incident to prevent similar mishaps.
Despite blaming the public, Ko knows what needs to be done, several times describing how the messaging and disaster response system could be improved. Similarly, he scoffed at government heads visiting disaster areas — calling such trips “publicity stunts” — but he canceled campaign events in the south of Taiwan to visit a blocked tunnel in Taipei’s Neihu District (內湖).
As he knows, publicity is crucial to a politician. It is one thing to explain the city’s actions, but trying to dodge responsibility will only make people angrier.
US aerospace company Boeing Co has in recent years been involved in numerous safety incidents, including crashes of its 737 Max airliners, which have caused widespread concern about the company’s safety record. It has recently come to light that titanium jet engine parts used by Boeing and its European competitor Airbus SE were sold with falsified documentation. The source of the titanium used in these parts has been traced back to an unknown Chinese company. It is clear that China is trying to sneak questionable titanium materials into the supply chain and use any ensuing problems as an opportunity to
It’s not every month that the US Department of State sends two deputy assistant secretary-level officials to Taiwan, together. Its rarer still that such senior State Department policy officers, once on the ground in Taipei, make a point of huddling with fellow diplomats from “like-minded” NATO, ANZUS and Japanese governments to coordinate their multilateral Taiwan policies. The State Department issued a press release on June 22 admitting that the two American “representatives” had “hosted consultations in Taipei” with their counterparts from the “Taiwan Ministry of Foreign Affairs.” The consultations were blandly dubbed the “US-Taiwan Working Group on International Organizations.” The State
The Chinese Supreme People’s Court and other government agencies released new legal guidelines criminalizing “Taiwan independence diehard separatists.” While mostly symbolic — the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has never had jurisdiction over Taiwan — Tamkang University Graduate Institute of China Studies associate professor Chang Wu-ueh (張五岳), an expert on cross-strait relations, said: “They aim to explain domestically how they are countering ‘Taiwan independence,’ they aim to declare internationally their claimed jurisdiction over Taiwan and they aim to deter Taiwanese.” Analysts do not know for sure why Beijing is propagating these guidelines now. Under Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), deciphering the
Many local news media last week reported that COVID-19 is back, citing doctors’ observations and the Centers for Disease Control’s (CDC) statistics. The CDC said that cases would peak this month and urged people to take preventive measures. Although COVID-19 has never been eliminated, it has become more manageable, and restrictions were dropped, enabling people to return to their normal way of life due to decreasing hospitalizations and deaths. In Taiwan, mandatory reporting of confirmed cases and home isolation ended in March last year, while the mask mandate at hospitals and healthcare facilities stopped in May. However, the CDC last week said the number