State-owned oil refiner CPC Corp, Taiwan (台灣中油) yesterday apologized for concealing an oil leak at its oil depot in Penghu, but said the situation has been brought under control.
CPC vice president Huang Jen-hung (黃仁弘) confirmed a report by the Chinese-language Apple Daily yesterday, saying that since the end of last year, 63m3 of gasoline gushing out of the Penghu depot has polluted nearly 0.8 hectares of land due to officials working at the oil depot failing to follow standard operating procedures.
However, CPC’s management team was unaware of the leak until they in May this year found a rusty steel plate at the bottom of a tank, the cause of the leak, Huang told reporters.
Under the utility’s decentralized management system, oil leaks are only reported when they are beyond a certain size, Huang said, adding that he believed workers at the oil depot decided not to report the matter because they thought they could fix the problem on their own.
Apart from setting up oil contamination booms to prevent the spread of the oil, CPC has begun restoration work near the site and would continually monitor the pollution for a year, Huang said.
CPC is planning to outsource the pollution remediation project to minimize the effect of the leaked fuel, it said in a statement, without providing a detailed timetable.
“CPC should have immediately explained the whole situation to the public when the company found the leak,” Deputy Minister of Economic Affairs Tseng Wen-sheng (曾文生) told reporters, calling for corporate responsibility.
The ministry would instruct CPC to carry out a comprehensive review and take appropriate disciplinary action, Tseng said.
The depot director and manager who concealed the incident have been disciplined, with each receiving a major demerit, CPC said.
In related news, the results of tests that the Penghu County Environmental Bureau is to conduct on underwater samples collected from two wells at CPC’s oil depot on Tuesday last week are to be made public in two weeks, the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) said yesterday.
The leak happened in June last year, while the bureau did not receive the utility’s notice until last week, EPA Soil and Groundwater Remediation Fund Management Board executive secretary Chen Shyh-wei (陳世偉) said.
The utility would face a fine of between NT$10,000 and NT$6 million (US$328 and US$196,818) for not reporting to the bureau of the leak happening within three hours, as required by Article 28 of the Water Pollution Control Act (水污染防治法), he said.
The local bureau might give the utility more fines if the latter did cause pollution to soil or groundwater, he said, adding total petroleum hydrocarbons are the key pollutants of the leak.
The EPA only knew about the incident yesterday from media reports because the bureau would not usually report it until it has sufficient evidence, Chen said, but added that some EPA officials have flown to the county to assist the bureau.
Additional reporting by CNA
ACCOUNTABILITY: The incident, which occured at a Shin Kong Mitsukoshi Department Store in Taichung, was allegedly caused by a gas explosion on the 12th floor Shin Kong Group (新光集團) president Richard Wu (吳昕陽) yesterday said the company would take responsibility for an apparent gas explosion that resulted in four deaths and 26 injuries at Shin Kong Mitsukoshi Zhonggang Store in Taichung yesterday. The Taichung Fire Bureau at 11:33am yesterday received a report saying that people were injured after an explosion at the department store on Section 3 of Taiwan Boulevard in Taichung’s Situn District (西屯). It sent 56 ambulances and 136 paramedics to the site, with the people injured sent to Cheng Ching Hospital’s Chung Kang Branch, Wuri Lin Shin Hospital, Taichung Veterans General Hospital or Chung
‘TAIWAN-FRIENDLY’: The last time the Web site fact sheet removed the lines on the US not supporting Taiwanese independence was during the Biden administration in 2022 The US Department of State has removed a statement on its Web site that it does not support Taiwanese independence, among changes that the Taiwanese government praised yesterday as supporting Taiwan. The Taiwan-US relations fact sheet, produced by the department’s Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, previously stated that the US opposes “any unilateral changes to the status quo from either side; we do not support Taiwan independence; and we expect cross-strait differences to be resolved by peaceful means.” In the updated version published on Thursday, the line stating that the US does not support Taiwanese independence had been removed. The updated
‘CORRECT IDENTIFICATION’: Beginning in May, Taiwanese married to Japanese can register their home country as Taiwan in their spouse’s family record, ‘Nikkei Asia’ said The government yesterday thanked Japan for revising rules that would allow Taiwanese nationals married to Japanese citizens to list their home country as “Taiwan” in the official family record database. At present, Taiwanese have to select “China.” Minister of Foreign Affairs Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍) said the new rule, set to be implemented in May, would now “correctly” identify Taiwanese in Japan and help protect their rights, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement. The statement was released after Nikkei Asia reported the new policy earlier yesterday. The name and nationality of a non-Japanese person marrying a Japanese national is added to the
There is no need for one country to control the semiconductor industry, which is complex and needs a division of labor, Taiwan’s top technology official said yesterday after US President Donald Trump criticized the nation’s chip dominance. Trump repeated claims on Thursday that Taiwan had taken the industry and he wanted it back in the US, saying he aimed to restore US chip manufacturing. National Science and Technology Council Minister Wu Cheng-wen (吳誠文) did not name Trump in a Facebook post, but referred to President William Lai’s (賴清德) comments on Friday that Taiwan would be a reliable partner in the
RSS