At least another five to nine of the pillars supporting the Maokong Gondola are unstable or damaged, a Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Taipei City councilor said yesterday, urging the Taipei City Government not to overlook the system’s safety issues.
Taipei City Councilor Chuang Ruei-hsiung (莊瑞雄) said that in addition to the problematic Tower No. 16, he had found other pillars that had been built on unstable ground.
One of the unstable pillars is located near the Zhinan Temple Station, Chuang said, but declined to say where the other problematic pillars were located.
He said he would make the details public once he has collected all the necessary information.
The pillars were built on unstable ground where the topsoil is fragile, and they could be damaged like Tower No. 16 if heavy rains or typhoons occurred, Chuang said.
“I was shocked when city government officials said there were no more damaged pillars. I hope they are not trying to cover up the truth,” he said at Taipei City Council.
The city government said on Tuesday that it was looking for alternative sites to relocate Tower No. 16, after typhoon-related flooding eroded the ground around the pillar.
Responding to Chuang’s allegations, Taipei City Government spokesman Yang Hsiao-tung (羊曉東) said the city government had no knowledge of any other damaged pillars.
However, Sherman Chen (陳雄文), commissioner of Taipei City’s Department of Economic Development, acknowledged on Tuesday that there was accumulated water around the slopes of certain pillars.
He said the city government would work to prevent any collapses in the area.
Meanwhile, DPP Chairperson Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) said President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), who was the mayor of Taipei when construction of the system started, should face an investigation into the construction of the cable car system.
She said as the gondola was located in a mountainous area, it should have first passed a strict environmental assessment and water and soil evaluation, but the Taipei City Government ignored such evaluations and completed the project hastily to make it a sightseeing place.
Tsai said the judiciary and the Control Yuan should conduct a swift investigation and punish officials responsible for the scandal.
ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY RICH CHANG
Taiwanese can file complaints with the Tourism Administration to report travel agencies if their activities caused termination of a person’s citizenship, Mainland Affairs Council Minister Chiu Chui-cheng (邱垂正) said yesterday, after a podcaster highlighted a case in which a person’s citizenship was canceled for receiving a single-use Chinese passport to enter Russia. The council is aware of incidents in which people who signed up through Chinese travel agencies for tours of Russia were told they could obtain Russian visas and fast-track border clearance, Chiu told reporters on the sidelines of an event in Taipei. However, the travel agencies actually applied
Japanese footwear brand Onitsuka Tiger today issued a public apology and said it has suspended an employee amid allegations that the staff member discriminated against a Vietnamese customer at its Taipei 101 store. Posting on the social media platform Threads yesterday, a user said that an employee at the store said that “those shoes are very expensive” when her friend, who is a migrant worker from Vietnam, asked for assistance. The employee then ignored her until she asked again, to which she replied: "We don't have a size 37." The post had amassed nearly 26,000 likes and 916 comments as of this
New measures aimed at making Taiwan more attractive to foreign professionals came into effect this month, the National Development Council said yesterday. Among the changes, international students at Taiwanese universities would be able to work in Taiwan without a work permit in the two years after they graduate, explainer materials provided by the council said. In addition, foreign nationals who graduated from one of the world’s top 200 universities within the past five years can also apply for a two-year open work permit. Previously, those graduates would have needed to apply for a work permit using point-based criteria or have a Taiwanese company
The Shilin District Prosecutors’ Office yesterday indicted two Taiwanese and issued a wanted notice for Pete Liu (劉作虎), founder of Shenzhen-based smartphone manufacturer OnePlus Technology Co (萬普拉斯科技), for allegedly contravening the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例) by poaching 70 engineers in Taiwan. Liu allegedly traveled to Taiwan at the end of 2014 and met with a Taiwanese man surnamed Lin (林) to discuss establishing a mobile software research and development (R&D) team in Taiwan, prosecutors said. Without approval from the government, Lin, following Liu’s instructions, recruited more than 70 software
RSS