In the aftermath of the 921 quake, at least one thing seems clear: public and private buildings were equally damaged. The fact that public buildings are supposed to be built to a higher standard has Vice President Lien Chan (3s戰) and other officials asking why.
Standards for public buildings are higher than for those that are privately built since they have the dual function of acting as shelters from natural disasters. But many of them, including school and fire department buildings, collapsed anyway.
Lien, in his capacity as KMT vice chairman, raised the issue of public buildings safety yesterday at the party's policy making central standing committee meeting.
"When I visited disaster areas ... I found serious safety problems in many public buildings, such as schools, police stations, fire departments and government buildings which did not withstand the tests posed by the earthquake," Lien said.
Citing statistics from the Ministry of Education, 43 schools in Nantou and Taichung counties were totally razed, while 700 schools nationwide were damaged in some way, he said.
Lien is not the only one alarmed. Lin Szu-chuan (林四?t), a senior civil engineer who accompanied foreign teams to assess the situation in disaster areas, said foreign experts were amazed at the large number of school buildings that had succumbed to the quake. "They were surprised at the way school children's safety seemed to have been ignored," Lin said.
Other public buildings also suffered major damage. A total of 51 police stations in Taichung, Nantou and Yunlin counties were destroyed and need to be re-built. In Nantou and Taichung, 10 fire departments were classified as hazardous. Some fire departments in Tainan, Taitung, and Kaohsiung, where few if any private buildings were reported damaged, also had serious cracks. As many as nine branch office buildings belonging to state-run Taipower were also ruined.
According to construction laws and regulations, school buildings should be 1.25 times better able to withstand earthquakes than that of private buildings; while fire departments and hospitals should be 1.5 times stronger. As Lien pointed out, the reason for higher standards is that schools are to serve as shelters when disasters hit; police stations and fire departments are where rescue missions are based; government buildings can be used as command centers.
The collapse of many government buildings, including county and township governments in Nantou, has seriously hampered official relief efforts.
DPP lawmaker Chang Ching-fang (
He demanded that damaged public buildings not to be torn down immediately so that prosecutors would have time to gather evidence for possible corruption cases.
But Lien was more diplomatic: "I believe the problem is with the process," he said. "Such things like insufficient budgeting, or that construction was not properly monitored."
Lin said that the system whereby schools contract out the construction of their buildings, particularly a number of years ago, was open for certain unscrupulous contractors to cut corners.
RSS