Seven were indicted yesterday for their roles in the Pachang Creek (
Premier Tang Fei (唐飛) also accepted yesterday evening the resignations of Chen Hung-yi (陳弘毅), head of the National Fire Administration Administrator, and Ding Yung-chin (丁原進), head of the National Police Administration.
The indicted include the owner and site supervisor of the riverbed construction project, staff members of the Chiayi Fire Department and the National Fire Department and a pilot of the airborne police.
In addition, a file describing the role of a major at the Ministry of National Defense's Rescue and Cooperation Center was handed over to military prosecutors, who are still investigating the incident.
"As the contractor and supervisor, respectively, of the construction project, Chang Yung-hui (張永輝) and Kuo Ching-shen (郭慶申) failed to fulfill their the legal obligation to ensure the safety of the workers," said Tseng Ming-fung (
The indictment states that weather forecasts issued the previous day had warned several times of sudden torrential rain, but Chang and Kuo ignored them and asked their employees to work on the riverbed anyway.
"The workers should have been -- but were not -- given any communication or safety equipment except for a 28m-long rope. The river is about 80 to 90m in width. When they learned that the flooding was imminent it was too late to escape," Tseng said.
Chang and Kuo were indicted on a charge of occupational negligence causing death -- an offense carrying a maximum imprisonment of five years.
Yu Ching-hung (游景宏), head of the Chiayi Fire Department's Chungpu Subsection, and Chen Feng-jen (陳豐仁), a senior member of the subsection, face the same charge for their failure to bring and use rope-throwing equipment.
"It should have occurred to Yu that in such a situation the rescue team must bring the [necessary] equipment to the scene but he didn't ask his team members to do so," Tseng said. "Chen not only failed to bring the equipment but also failed to ask any of his junior colleagues to go back to fetch it once at the scene."
Tseng also said that Chen was resigned to wait for a helicopter to aid in the rescue and do nothing more. "Chen even said that he did not know that they had rope-throwing equipment at their base. Was this the proper attitude for a senior rescuer to take?"
Hsu Ching-hui (許清輝) and Lu Wen-tsun (呂文村) were the officials on duty at the National Fire Administration's command center. They were indicted on a charge of negligence leading to the catastrophe.
The indictment says that Hsu and Lu repeatedly neglected requests from the Chiayi Fire Department to apply for helicopter rescue assistance.
As for the airborne pilot, Yang Tao-hung (
Furthermore, Tseng said, because the four workers were swept away before Yang had even taken off, he forged the record, giving a take-off time of 17 minutes earlier than it actually was. Yang faces charges of negligence and forgery.
Tseng said that the official on duty at the command center of the National Defense's Rescue and Cooperation Center was also liable.
AGING: As of last month, people aged 65 or older accounted for 20.06 percent of the total population and the number of couples who got married fell by 18,685 from 2024 Taiwan has surpassed South Korea as the country least willing to have children, with an annual crude birthrate of 4.62 per 1,000 people, Ministry of the Interior data showed yesterday. The nation was previously ranked the second-lowest country in terms of total fertility rate, or the average number of children a woman has in her lifetime. However, South Korea’s fertility rate began to recover from 2023, with total fertility rate rising from 0.72 and estimated to reach 0.82 to 0.85 by last year, and the crude birthrate projected at 6.7 per 1,000 people. Japan’s crude birthrate was projected to fall below six,
US President Donald Trump in an interview with the New York Times published on Thursday said that “it’s up to” Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) what China does on Taiwan, but that he would be “very unhappy” with a change in the “status quo.” “He [Xi] considers it to be a part of China, and that’s up to him what he’s going to be doing, but I’ve expressed to him that I would be very unhappy if he did that, and I don’t think he’ll do that. I hope he doesn’t do that,” Trump said. Trump made the comments in the context
SELF-DEFENSE: Tokyo has accelerated its spending goal and its defense minister said the nation needs to discuss whether it should develop nuclear-powered submarines China is ramping up objections to what it sees as Japan’s desire to acquire nuclear weapons, despite Tokyo’s longstanding renunciation of such arms, deepening another fissure in the two neighbors’ increasingly tense ties. In what appears to be a concerted effort, China’s foreign and defense ministries issued statements on Thursday condemning alleged remilitarism efforts by Tokyo. The remarks came as two of the country’s top think tanks jointly issued a 29-page report framing actions by “right-wing forces” in Japan as posing a “serious threat” to world peace. While that report did not define “right-wing forces,” the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs was
PREPAREDNESS: Given the difficulty of importing ammunition during wartime, the Ministry of National Defense said it would prioritize ‘coproduction’ partnerships A newly formed unit of the Marine Corps tasked with land-based security operations has recently replaced its aging, domestically produced rifles with more advanced, US-made M4A1 rifles, a source said yesterday. The unnamed source familiar with the matter said the First Security Battalion of the Marine Corps’ Air Defense and Base Guard Group has replaced its older T65K2 rifles, which have been in service since the late 1980s, with the newly received M4A1s. The source did not say exactly when the upgrade took place or how many M4A1s were issued to the battalion. The confirmation came after Chinese-language media reported
RSS