Transportation authorities said yesterday that the Taipei-Ilan freeway's Hsuehshan Tunnel (
"We're happy to hear Minister of Transportation and Communications Lin Ling-san (
Lin announced late on Tuesday night that the opening date of the tunnel would be delayed and that no timetable had been set for its opening.
Lin said the ministry would not open the tunnel until all safety facilities were fully installed.
Lin had planned to open the tunnel before the Lunar New Year, despite the objections of tunnel inspectors.
The plan was seen by many as a desperate effort by Lin to keep his job.
Although the opening of the tunnel has been postponed, Lin said the segment of the freeway between Toucheng (
The 12.9 km tunnel -- the fifth-longest in the world -- is the centerpiece of the 31km Taipei-Ilan freeway segment connecting Taipei City's Nangang (
Once completed, the freeway is expected to reduce travel time between Taipei and Ilan from two hours to 40 minutes.
Inspector Lee Ke-tsung (
The fire extinguishing system, for example, won't be done until the end of next month.
The lighting and electronic system, as well as the ventilation system, may not be completed until the end of March, while the traffic control system is not expected to be finished until the end of May.
The freeway is considered a major breakthrough for Ilan's transportation and road development. Construction of the tunnel, which began in July 1991, has been a trying task.
The team originally planned to complete the drilling for the Hsuehshan Tunnel by the end of 2000.
However, in the first two years of work, there was hardly any progress as the team was held up by Hsuehshan's odd series of faults and frequent flooding.
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
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
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