The Ministry of Transportation and Communications said yesterday it planned to fix 52 critically damaged bridges nationwide in the next five years.
Chi Wen-jong (祈文中), director of the ministry’s Department of Railways and Highways, said that last year the Directorate General of Highways (DGH) had identified 68 old or decaying bridges and estimated that the cost of repairing them could reach NT$23.9 billion (US$747 million).
However, the typhoons that swept the country between July and last month had damaged other bridges that were not on the original list, he said.
“The minister then asked the DGH to do another nationwide survey, and it has identified 15 more high-risk bridges on the provincial highways that may not be able to withstand future disasters or storms,” Chi said.
Nine of these 15 new bridges are in Kaohsiung County, two are in Ilan County, one in Taipei County, one in Nantou County, one in Pingtung County and one in Taitung County.
The DGH also reexamined the 68 bridges previously identified as dangerous. Thirty-seven of them are categorized as high-risk bridges.
Chi said that the DGH had to recalculate the construction costs for these 52 bridges and submit a new proposal for approval by the ministry.
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
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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