Heavy rainfall in southern Taiwan yesterday disrupted traffic in the air and on the ground and added needed water to reservoirs.
An official of the Water Conservancy Agency of the Ministry of Economic Affairs said that certain areas in southern Taiwan have received more than 300mm of rain since Thursday afternoon.
PHOTO: CHANG CHONG-YI, TAIPEI TIMES
The water-collecting areas of the Tsengwen and Nanhua reservoirs in southern Taiwan had received 98.2mm and 136.7mm of rain, respectively, by noon yesterday.
The Feitsui and Shihmen reservoirs in northern Taiwan had accumulated 48.85mm and 38.6mm, respectively, by noon yesterday.
The water level at the Feitsui Reservoir stood at 134.24m, while that of the Shihmen Reservoir was 212.96m as of yesterday afternoon.
The rains will help relieve the drought in southern Taiwan, although much more rain is needed to fill the reservoirs in other parts of the country, the official said.
While the rain was good news for water officials, the precipitation, combined with strong winds, disrupted traffic in Kaohsiung City yesterday morning, prompting the city government to establish a natural disaster prevention center.
The rain has also caused problems for farmers in Kaohsiung and Pingtung counties, as rivers in the area flooded their farmland.
Some flights in Tainan, Kaohsiung and Taitung were delayed by strong winds and heavy rainfall yesterday morning.
The Tainan Airport was closed temporarily three times in the morning and afternoon. Seven flights were cancelled as a result.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching