A fire broke out at a lithium battery warehouse in New Taipei City’s Shenkeng District (深坑) at about 2pm on Tuesday last week. It caused an acrid smell that spread across several districts in the city and in neighboring Taipei, with the unpleasant odor persisting until the next day.
The warehouse contained a large number of lithium batteries that might emit hydrogen fluoride and various other toxic gases when they are burned.
Let us evaluate whether the two cities’ mayors and environmental protection departments fulfilled their responsibilities to tell residents how to respond, thus protecting people’s health and upholding the community’s right to know.
Over the years, we at the Environmental Rights Foundation have contributed to amending the Air Pollution Control Act (空氣污染防制法).
One achievement of our achievements is authorizing local governments’ environmental protection departments, in accordance with Article 33, Paragraph 4 of the act, to send alerts about deteriorating air quality to residents via SMS, radio and television broadcasts, and cable TV. This keeps residents informed in the event of a major air pollution incident, telling them how to respond to the pollution and letting them know what kind of hazards they might face.
The conditions for sending air pollution alerts are quite strict. They require that 30 or more people are taken to hospital because of a major air pollution incident, or that the polluted area includes schools or medical or social welfare institutions on a scale of 30 or more people. The air pollution hazard must also likely have a significant impact on the community and the local government’s environmental protection department must believe that the situation might continue to deteriorate.
These are the conditions under which it is deemed necessary to issue an air quality deterioration alert, but one wonders how many times local environmental protection departments have issued such alerts since this procedure was established.
Do local governments have standard operating procedures for sending such alerts?
The Shenkeng fire showed that the Taipei and New Taipei City governments do not know what to do when there is an air pollution incident. They even got caught up in a discussion about whether air pollution tests would be harmful to city residents.
On the evening of the incident, only the New Taipei City Fire Department and its Environmental Protection Department posted advice on their Facebook pages, telling people to close their doors and windows and to wear a mask if they need to go outside.
It was only the following morning that the Taipei Department of Environmental Protection and the mayors of the two cities posted on Facebook and issued news releases telling the public what was going on.
In the meantime, people living near the scene of the fire were anxious and did not know what to do. The health of people living in the two cities was exposed to unknown air pollutants.
On the evening of the fire it was almost entirely up to local residents, borough wardens and city councilors acting on their own initiative to find the source of the smell and tell affected residents how to respond.
How about foreigners who do not speak Chinese or the visually or hearing impaired? How would they get the necessary information and find out what to do?
This situation was simply down to negligent administration in the two cities.
The notification procedure for major air pollution incidents should be reviewed as soon as possible, so that SMS, radio and television could be used to tell people how to respond, including non-Chinese speakers and people with physical and mental disabilities.
The information should include what substances have been released in the leak, how toxic they are and what residents could do about it.
Combined with the existing notification mechanism, this would guarantee the community’s right to know and improve the effectiveness of disaster mitigation and prevention.
Lin Yan-ting is a researcher and campaigner with the Environmental Rights Foundation.
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