Taipei city councilors, during a meeting of the city council’s transportation committee yesterday, accused the Taipei Department of Mass Rapid Transit Systems (DORTS) of misleading the public by using different names for the danger values and for allegedly being in the dark on some numbers that were critical for the building’s success.
The meeting was held due to recent reports that the construction of Taipei Dome was negatively affecting the Bannan MRT Line, reportedly causing cracks in the tunnels near Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall MRT Station.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) City Councilor Lee Ching-yuan (李慶元) said DORTS has repeatedly used the word “action value” (行動值) in its reports, when it was actually referring to the “danger value” (危險值) of the building.
Photo copied by Kuo Yi, Taipei Times
Such misuse of terminology is misleading to the public, Lee said, adding that it was also odd that the department was unaware of missing figures for underground water pressure and cracks in the walls of the MRT tunnels.
DORTS Director Chou Li-liang (周禮良) yesterday said that by law, the reports should have used “danger value” to better reflect monitored statistics, adding that the use of “action value” resulted simply out of habit because that term is more prevalent in engineering.
When asked why the department was continuing its efforts to ask Farglory Land Development Co (遠雄建設) to improve on the structure’s lower levels when Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) had suggested tearing down the facility, Chou said that the city government had not consulted him on the issue.
Chou said he had merely told the city government that the construction efforts on the Dome would affect the MRT system and the city government should establish a task force to monitor the situation.
While the “action value” of the monitoring location on the crossings of Yixian Road and Zhongxiao E Road was not the closest to the Dome construction zone, it was the location with the highest ratings, KMT City Councilor Tai Shi-chin (戴錫欽) said.
Such findings mean that construction zones closer to Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall MRT Station and its No. 5 exit on Zhongxiao E Road would yield higher ratings, but DORTS does not have information from that area, Tai said.
KMT City Councilor Chen Li-hui (陳孋輝) said that it was surprising how the department was reliant on secondhand information recorded by monitoring devices installed by Farglory, instead of the department itself.
Chou said that the tunnels near Yixian Road and Zhongxiao E Road exhibited larger cracks due to the soil being softer in the area, adding that there was no major horizontal displacement and no risk of fatalities.
DORTS has been monitoring information provided by Farglory, but upon discovery of a worsening situation in terms of action values, it has also sent out personnel to observe in person, Chou said, adding that the monitoring team would continue to make on-site inspections and would be asking Farglory to increase the frequency of monitoring reports from once a month to once every two weeks.
Meanwhile, the director of the city government’s east area construction zone, Chen Yao-wei (陳耀維), said that there were displacements in the station and its tunnels, especially around the Yixian Road and Zhongxiao E Road intersection, where it was displaced by 9.7cm.
However, Chen Yao-wei said that while the figures showed abnormalities, it was not critically dangerous, adding that parts of the station’s rail lines are also slanted by 0.5cm, but that such issues could easily be fixed.
Farglory said when asked for comments that it hopes to expedite the construction as much as possible because delayed construction time might cause changes to the soil, but said that the situation was currently stable because the foundations had taken such matters into account and reinforcements had been made.
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