Former National Fire Administration (NFA) director-general Chao Kang (趙鋼) yesterday said the government should abolish the Central Emergency Operation Center (CEOC) and create a standing Cabinet-level institution to coordinate damage prevention and emergency preparedness.
Chao made the remarks as he commented on President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) recent proposal to establish an agency under the Ministry of the Interior (MOI) to handle disaster-related tasks.
“A disaster management agency won’t work if it is not elevated to Cabinet-level status,” Chao said at a legislative hearing on disaster relief work hosted by Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Cheng Li-wen (鄭麗文) yesterday.
SAME OLD STORY
Chao said it would be just the same old story if a disaster management agency were established under the MOI, and that it wouldn’t make any changes to the existing rescue system, which is mainly managed by the National Fire Agency (NFA) — also under the MOI.
Under the current disaster response system governed by the Disaster Prevention and Protection Act (災害防救法), an ad hoc CEOC is to be activated when an emergency occurs, with the NFA in charge of its operations and senior civil servants from different Cabinet-level agencies taking turns serving the center during the period.
The Act states that the CEOC is to be overseen by the chairman of the Executive Yuan’s National Disaster Prevention and Protection Commission. Currently, the duty falls on Vice Premier Paul Chiu’s (邱正雄) shoulders.
PADDING
“Given the make-up of the CEOC, it’s impossible that it will run well. Its members won’t concentrate on disaster-related tasks, which they consider as adjunct work,” Chao said.
Chien Shien-wen (簡賢文), an associate professor at Central Police University’s Fire Science Department, agreed with Chao, saying that it was not appropriate for the ad hoc agency to serve as a facility for civil servants to pad their resumes with experience at disaster prevention and relief.
REFUGEES
Liu Chung-ming (柳中明), the head of National Taiwan University’s Global Change Research Center, said the damage caused by Typhoon Morakot had created the first instance of “climate refugees” in the country, and urged the government to quickly classify other areas that are under threat.
Liao Pen-chuan (廖本全), an associate professor at National Taipei University’s Department of Real Estate and Building Environment, called on the government to propose a plan to restore deforested and overdeveloped national land.
“Typhoon Morakot tells us that disasters will occur again and again, not only in southern Taiwan, but elsewhere. The whole country is immersed in crisis,” Liao said.
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