Man dies in incinerator accident

A worker cleaning a waste incinerator in Tsaotun township (草屯鎮), Nantou County, was killed when residue on the inside wall of the incinerator collapsed, burying him.

According to Lin Bing-tsai (林炳在), head of Tsaotun Township Office's cleaning team, the deceased, 40-year-old Liang Heng-en (梁恆恩), fell to the bottom of the incinerator on Monday evening while he was removing residue stuck to the inside wall of the incinerator. The incinerator walls are more than 10m high.

It took firemen wearing heat-resistant protective suits hours to find Liang's body, which was buried in hot quartz sand heated to about 70?C. His body was eventually removed from the hot furnace early yesterday morning.

Prosecutors yesterday examined Liang's body, attributing his death to suffocation and burns.

Lin said the township office had given Liang's family NT$20,000 as commpensation.

The incinerator, whose daily capacity is 95 tonnes of waste, was built by Chujan Environmental Engineering Service (巨展環保) on a site owned by the township office. According to the build-operate-transfer contract under which it was constructed, the township office only needs to ensure that a certain amount of household waste is supplied to the operator.

The incinerator went into operation in December last year. A one-week regular clean-up and maintenance session began last Friday.

According to Lai Yung-sheng (賴湧勝), a manager at Chujan, the team in charge of the clean-up was a professional one that had cleaned many larger incinerators in other counties.

Lai said the clean-up was processed according to standard operating procedures, which regulate working conditions such as temperature, oxygen, the maximum time that workers can stay inside and the stabilization of scaffolds.

"The death was a pure accident caused by the falling of the residue inside the incinerator," Lai said.

Li Hsin-jung (李信融), an official of Nantou County's Environmental Protection Bureau, said the bureau had nothing to do with the accident.

"Local environmental officials only supervise the operation of waste incinerators to see if emissions meet regulations and how much household waste is treated," Li said.

According to Li labor affairs officials have not demanded an immediate shutdown, because all maintenance followed the stan-dard operating procedures.

People opposed to incinerators said yesterday that Liang's death could be attributed to lax accident prevention measures at incinerators.

"Local environmental authorities should strictly supervise not only the operation but also the maintenance of incinerators," said George Cheng (鄭益明), secretary-general of the Taiwan Watch Institution.

Environmentalists say the maintenance of incinerators constructed under build-operate-transfer contracts is exempt from government supervision. According to activists, safety sometimes relies on luck.

Activists said there are no guidelines regarding the maintenance of waste incinerators established by the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA), which has strongly promoted burning-oriented waste management policies since the 1990s.