Incessant drizzle over the past month has failed to stave off the next wave of water restrictions in Taipei City and County, which will be implemented tomorrow, the Taipei Water Department yesterday.
The water supply to heavy users, including car-washes, spas, hotels and swimming pools, will be cut by 20 percent and to industrial users by 5 percent -- based on their water consumption during February, March, April and May last year.
Public organizations and schools will be asked to stop unnecessary use of water for the next four months. Hospitals and medical centers are excluded from the news measures, according to Taipei Water Department official Chen Pai-ken (
Those who violate the regulations will be first warned and then have their water supply suspended for one day if they continue to use too much water, Chen said yesterday.
The first stage of water rationing, which was a cut in water pressure last month, failed to offset the effects of limited rainfall, Chen said.
Chen said the measures would not affect residents' daily lives.
However, nearly 600 heavy water users -- who had their water cut for several weeks in the summer of 2002 -- crowded into a meeting held at the Taipei Water Department yesterday to complain that it was not fair to base ration amounts on last year's consumption.
"It was the period of the SARS outbreak and most of us had bad business. Water consumption was low," said one spa hotel owner from Chungho. "Now the business has become better but the government has started water rationing."
One car-wash owner suggested that the water department dredge the reservoirs to allow them to hold more water.
Chen promised those businesses to deal with their problems case by case but urged owners to understand the situation and economize on water during the dry season.
Kuo Ray-hwa (
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
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
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