Editorial: The circus masks the real questions

It's a familiar pattern. First there is some kind of disaster -- yesterday it was the financially hard-hitting (damage estimated at US$20 million) but otherwise innocuous Eastern Science Park fire; last October it was the tragic crash of SQ006 at CKS Airport and the flooding in Keelung after Typhoon Xangsane; last July saw the Pachang Creek (八掌溪) incident in which four people were left stranded for hours in the middle of a flash flood waiting for help until being washed away in full view of the assembled TV cameras. Then the circus begins.

First legislators with something to prove -- usually only that they are flatulent egotists, as TV viewers saw Taipei County Legislator Lo Ming-tsai (羅明才) demonstrate so persuasively yesterday as he grilled the head of the National Fire Administration -- strut around the site of the disaster, trying to persuade us that they are men of action and responsibility and we should give them another three years to dip their hands in the public cookie jar at the next election.

Then out come the "big shots" -- we use the term ironically -- who point out that it is all the government's fault and heads must roll. Yesterday's poltroon of the day was KMT spokesman Wang Chih-kang (王志剛), who was quick to point out that the fire in Hsichih might lead to an increase in unemployment, thereby managing to use the fire to take a dig at the DPP's performance in managing an economic slowdown very much of his own party's making.

In the next few days we can expect ritual denunciations from all the opposition parties and demands that some highly placed official, probably Premier Chang Chun-hsiung (張俊雄), should step down to "take responsibility." The heads of Taipei County Commissioner Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌) and Chao Kang (趙鋼), the luckless chief of the National Fire Administration will also be asked for and, in the case of the latter, probably received. After all, Chang will have to throw something to the ravening pack if he wants to pacify them and since Chao is close to People First Party leader James Soong (宋楚瑜), he should be easily expendable. Chang was certainly looking for someone to blame as he fulminated at the site yesterday about the fire "being allowed to spread" -- somehow we doubt that it asked permission before it did so.

Oh, and the government will have to set up a task force. We understand one will be established this morning for "recovery" though surely that is the concern of the companies whose property has been damaged and their insurance companies.

The din of the all-style, no-content political show may drown out the real questions to be asked from the Hsichih fire, which would be a pity. One of these will be why there was no available fire truck with an extendable ladder which could reach the upper floors of the burning building. Taipei County apparently doesn't have one. Neither does anybody else. But this may be a red herring. As an architect told this newspaper's reporter, tall buildings rely on their own containment and extinguishing systems to fight fires; ladder trucks can do comparatively little. That the fire was so damaging was, apparently, a result of the failure of the building's electrical system on which its sprinkler operation depended.

So here's the really interesting question: the building was constructed only six years ago to conform to safety standards which remain largely unchanged. So how could such a disastrous system malfunction happen? Should it, could it have been foreseen? Was it bad luck -- there really is such a thing -- or bad planning? There is real need to know; let us hope that this is not forgotten amid the surrounding political cacophony.