People across the country received a rude awakening in the early hours of yesterday morning as an earthquake measuring 6.6 on the Richter scale shook the nation at 1.51am.
The quake lasted almost a minute with an aftershock of magnitude 5.7 striking four minutes later.
No casualties were reported as of press time, but there was a report of a collapsed concrete gate at a 40-year-old temple in Ilan.
PHOTO: CNA
Hsinchu County police said yesterday there was no damage in the Hsinchu Science Park -- known as "Taiwan's Silicon Valley" -- in the wake of yesterday's quake.
The nation's biggest telecom operator Chunghwa Telecom Co (中華電信) said the earthquake had caused minor damage to an undersea cable and caused telecom service congestion between Taiwan and neighboring countries.
All affected telecom services including voice, Internet access and data transmission were back to normal yesterday afternoon after the company diverted the traffic to unaffected cables or routers, Chunghwa Telecom said in a statement.
An optical cable located on the seabed off Hualien was damaged by the quake, the carrier said.
Traffic to Japan, Korea and Hong Kong was gridlocked because of the damage, said an official from the company's public relation department by phone.
"Fortunately, the damage is minor compared with that caused by quakes last year," the official said.
Chunghwa Telecom said it would send a cable ship to the scene to perform repairs. It expected the repairs to be completed within three weeks.
Last December, a string of strong earthquakes off Taiwan affected undersea cables linking Taiwan to the rest of the world, disrupting all telecom services and Web access.
To minimize damage from natural disasters, Chunghwa Telecom plans to join other telecom operators in the construction of a new US$500 million undersea fiber-optic cable across the Pacific Ocean.
Lu Pei-ling (
Lu said the epicenter of yesterday's earthquake and aftershocks was on the same seismic belt as that of a quake on March 31, 2002, which measured 6.8 on the Richter scale.
Yesterday's earthquake was felt most strongly in Ilan, Hualien and Taitung Counties, with a magnitude reaching five, the bureau said.
The magnitude topped four in Taichung County, three in Chiayi County and Taipei City, two in Tainan County, three in Kaohsiung County and two in Taipei County.
Lu said that the earthquake happened as the tectonic plate from the Philippines moved toward the Eurasian tectonic plate, leading to subduction.
Subduction is a seismological term used to describe a phenomenon where one tectonic plate slides beneath the other and moves downwards.
The bureau has cautioned that the chance of aftershocks remains high for the rest of the week. The public is advised to watch for falling rocks when traveling in mountainous areas.
Three earthquakes of similar magnitude have occurred so far this year. Besides yesterday's, one struck in January and the other in July. They were measured at 6.2 and 6, respectively, on the Richter scale.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods