Tainan County Council launched a petition yesterday calling for a water channeling project to be scrapped on concerns that it led to landslides that wiped out Siaolin Village (小林) in Kaohsiung County during Typhoon Morakot.
The project, which involves channeling water from Kaohsiung’s Laonong River to Tainan’s Zengwun Reservoir and delivering treated water back to Kaohsiung, is intended to resolve water shortages in the Kaohsiung area.
The council will submit the petition to the Cabinet.
Wu Chien-pao (吳健保), speaker of the council, said residents had opposed the project from the start because it involved blasting the ground with dynamite, which they feared could make topography in the area unstable.
The Water Resources Agency, which is in charge of the NT$21.2 billion (US$645 million) project, has already been fined NT$1.5 million for failing to obtain permission for part of the work.
The construction is expected to be completed in 2012.
Wu said the reservoir had seldom reached full capacity in the past, but the situation has changed in recent years because of global warming.
Channeling water from the Laonong River could be too much for the reservoir during torrential rains, flooding communities downstream, Wu 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:
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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