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.
As Taiwan’s domestic political crisis deepens, the opposition Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) have proposed gutting the country’s national spending, with steep cuts to the critical foreign and defense ministries. While the blue-white coalition alleges that it is merely responding to voters’ concerns about corruption and mismanagement, of which there certainly has been plenty under Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and KMT-led governments, the rationales for their proposed spending cuts lay bare the incoherent foreign policy of the KMT-led coalition. Introduced on the eve of US President Donald Trump’s inauguration, the KMT’s proposed budget is a terrible opening
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus in the Legislative Yuan has made an internal decision to freeze NT$1.8 billion (US$54.7 million) of the indigenous submarine project’s NT$2 billion budget. This means that up to 90 percent of the budget cannot be utilized. It would only be accessible if the legislature agrees to lift the freeze sometime in the future. However, for Taiwan to construct its own submarines, it must rely on foreign support for several key pieces of equipment and technology. These foreign supporters would also be forced to endure significant pressure, infiltration and influence from Beijing. In other words,
“I compare the Communist Party to my mother,” sings a student at a boarding school in a Tibetan region of China’s Qinghai province. “If faith has a color,” others at a different school sing, “it would surely be Chinese red.” In a major story for the New York Times this month, Chris Buckley wrote about the forced placement of hundreds of thousands of Tibetan children in boarding schools, where many suffer physical and psychological abuse. Separating these children from their families, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) aims to substitute itself for their parents and for their religion. Buckley’s reporting is
Last week, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), together holding more than half of the legislative seats, cut about NT$94 billion (US$2.85 billion) from the yearly budget. The cuts include 60 percent of the government’s advertising budget, 10 percent of administrative expenses, 3 percent of the military budget, and 60 percent of the international travel, overseas education and training allowances. In addition, the two parties have proposed freezing the budgets of many ministries and departments, including NT$1.8 billion from the Ministry of National Defense’s Indigenous Defense Submarine program — 90 percent of the program’s proposed
RSS