Builder called a cheater

Taipei City Government yesterday halted construction of the Wanhua district government building after four DPP city councilors said the government's monitoring of the work had been "careless."

The councilors had just pre-sented evidence to a press conference of what they said was the contractor's "skimping on work and materials."

"The supervision process seems to have been rather careless," said Lee Chien-chang (李建昌), one of the councilors. "More often than not, there has only been one official from the city's construction department accompanying the contractor to witness the compression resistance tests."

Compression resistance refers to concrete's ability to withstand impact. Small samples of concrete are tested after being removed from construction beams by drilling into them.

The councilors urged the city government to halt construction immediately and to re-examine the compression resistance of the whole structure before allowing construction to resume.

The councilors, Lee, Duan Yi-kang (段宜康), Tsai Chiu-feng (蔡秋鳳) and Chiang Kai-shih (江蓋世), alleged that the builders replaced concrete samples that had failed a compression resistance test with different samples for submission to a second test.

"During the first compression resistance test," Duan said, "three concrete samples were determined to have resistance of 190kg/cm2, 365kg/cm2 and 141kg/cm2."

The building's construction con-tract demands a minimum resistance of 280kg/cm2.

"Apparently, not only did two out of the three fail to pass the compression resistance test," Duan added, "but one of them only came to half of the contractual standard.

"In light of the unsatisfactory results, the builders claimed that the test, performed at the city government's Bureau of Public Works, had been poorly carried out and asked for a second test to be conducted by a private firm of civil engineers."

On Wednesday, in accordance with standard procedure, Duan's assistant and five Taipei City Government officials went to the construction site to obtain the concrete samples for the second test.

"While we were there, we came to strongly suspect that the builders had knowingly replaced the original samples with others before presenting them to us," Duan said.

They showed video footage to support their statement.

In the video, the sample taken from the concrete beam had a rough surface, "yet the concrete samples we received from the constructors turned out to have smooth surfaces," Duan said.

Tsai said the contract requires that any floor, ceiling or wall in the building with an average compression resistance of less than 85 percent of the minimum of 280kg/cm2 must be replaced.

The councilors threatened to turn the case over to the local prosecutors' office if the government failed to take immediate action.

After viewing the video, Tsao Shih-chieh (曹世傑), a section head from the city government's ethics department, agreed that there were defects with the concrete beams shown in the film.

He said that the Taipei City Government would halt work on the building immediately and conduct another concrete compression resistance test with the Taipei City Civil Engineering Union to determine whether the contractor had met its obligations.