Twenty-two naval officers, including the commander of the Navy, have been disciplined over the grounding of a Kuang Hua No. 6 missile speedboat late last month, Minister of National Defense Chen Chao-min (陳肇敏) said on Wednesday.
Answering questions at a meeting of the legislature’s Diplomacy and National Defense Committee, Chen said that in a report on the accident, the Ministry of National Defense concluded that human error was the direct cause of the boat’s grounding off the coast of Chiayi County while it was taking part in the Han Kuang No. 24 military exercises.
RESPONSIBILITY
The ministry penalized 22 naval officers it found to be responsible for the accident, Chen said.
The fast-attack missile boat ran aground on Sept. 25 in bad weather. The 14 crewmen on board were rescued shortly after the mishap.
In the following days, rescue workers from the Navy removed the four Hsiung Feng anti-ship missiles, the navigation system and other important equipment from on board the vessel.
On Oct. 10, a Navy salvage team used two giant cranes to pull the 150-tonne boat out of shallow water and towed it to Chiayi County’s Budai Harbor (布袋) for preliminary repairs before moving it to Kaohsiung Harbor for an overhaul.
UNDER THE SURFACE
Although the hull of the boat appeared to be in satisfactory condition, Navy frogmen who inspected the vessel below water said they had discovered five holes in the bottom.
The missile boat is a prototype designed by the Navy under its Kuang Hua No. 6 Missile Speedboat Plan to phase out 50-tonne Seagull-class missile boats. It is 34m long and 7.6m wide, with a top speed of 63kph.
Under the Kuang Hua No. 6 plan, 30 boats will be built at a cost of about NT$400 million (US$12.29 million) each.
The state-run Kaohsiung-based CSBC Corp Taiwan — the nation’s largest shipbuilder — began building the boats last November.
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
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