Minister of the Interior Liao Liou-yi (廖了以) paid a visit to the family of Fu Chia-sen (傅家森), a volunteer firefighter who was killed during a search and rescue mission at a landfill construction site in Taichung City early on Sunday, to express his condolences.
Fu was pronounced dead after he was pulled out of the dirt at the site, city officials said.
Taichung Deputy Mayor Hsiao Jia-chi (蕭家旗), who accompanied Liao on the visit to Fu’s home, said that although Fu was a volunteer, the city government would offer compensation available to the families of full-time firefighters because he sacrificed his life in an effort to rescue others.
Fu joined the volunteer firefighting service more than 10 years ago and was cited last year as a role model.
Liao and Hsiao also visited Taichung Veterans General Hospital to extend their regards to two fire department staff members who were injured in the landslides at the construction site.
The landslides left one dead, one missing and two firefighters injured, city officials said.
The first landslide occurred at around 9am, burying a construction worker identified as Wu Cheng-wei (吳正維). The search for Wu was still under way at press time.
The Taichung City Government Fire Department dispatched a rescue team immediately after it received a distress call.
While fire department staff and volunteers were busy searching for the buried worker, there was a second landslide that buried Fu.
Fu’s colleagues then rushed to mount a new search mission. At around 1pm, they spotted part of Fu’s clothing and tried to pull him out.
However, another landslide hit, causing two others to sink into the soft dirt.
They were eventually pulled out and sent to a hospital for treatment.
The contractor on the retaining wall reinforcement project said the landslides were probably caused by water seeping from ready-mixed concrete used in the construction of the wall.
The project involves 19 10m-high culverts built beneath the landfill. Because of the soft soil in the region, land excavation was being done manually rather than by machines.
City government officials said they would conduct a thorough investigation to determine who was accountable for the tragic accident.
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
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
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