An oil leak from a ship that ran aground off the coast of Taipei County last week has damaged local fishermen’s livelihoods, a fishermen’s association official said yesterday.
Although the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) has said the oil leak would not have a major impact on the local ecosystem and that there were no sensitive ecological areas in the area, local fishermen are still worried about their catches for the rest of this year, said Tsai Kun-huei (蔡崑輝), chairman of the Fishermen’s Association of Shihmen (石門) and Jinshan townships (金山).
“The fishermen’s fishing tackles are tainted with oil, as well as some of the catches,” Tsai said.
At least 4,000 of Shihmen Township’s 12,000 residents are fishermen, Tsai said, adding that the oil leak has severely hurt their livelihood.
The local ecosystem also might not be restored in a short period of time, he said.
Tsai said he was also worried that the oil leak would hurt fishing for flathead mullet, which is currently in season.
Flathead mullet a favorite fish in Taiwanese cuisine.
The oil came from the Panama-registered cargo ship Morning Sun, which was forced to drop anchor near Taiwan while enroute from Singapore to South Korea because of bad weather.
An operational mistake caused the ship to run aground 300m offshore near Shihmen, fracturing the ship’s hull.
About 91 tonnes of heavy oil leaked out, polluting 3km of coastlines.
More than 363 tonnes of heavy oil and diesel fuel remain in the ship’s fuel tank, and the EPA estimated that it would take 18 days to remove all the oil from the tank.
Chen Hsien-heng (陳咸亨), director general of the EPA’s Department of Water Quality Protection, told a press conference that the operation to remove the oil left in the tank would begin today if weather conditions permitted.
Although the fracture in the fuel tank still has not been found, Chen said, booms that can absorb and block the oil from spreading have been deployed near the ship and the shoreline.
Meanwhile, the First Nuclear Power Plant has been told to set up the booms to prevent the oil from entering its water intake, Chen said.
Chen said that about 200 residents are cleaning up the oil that has already been washed ashore every day but about 700m of coastline still needs to be cleaned up.
However, the clean-up work would be finished within a week, he said.
An interagency task force from the Coast Guard Administration, Fisheries Agency, Taipei County Government, Jinshan Township fishermen’s association, Keelung Harbor Bureau and the ship owner is helping with the clean-up.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the