Tropical Storm Parma moved away from Taiwan yesterday, leaving behind it flooding throughout Yilan County. One person died in the storm, while 6,831 people had been evacuated as of Monday night, the Central Emergency Operation Center (CEOC) reported yesterday.
A 43-year-old man living in Taitung County’s Beinan Township (卑南) drowned after falling into a flooded river, the center said.
Heavy rains from the storm triggered serious flooding in Yilan, submerging Yilan City and townships including Sansing (三星), Wujie (五結), Dongshan (冬山), Jhuangwei (壯圍), Datong (大同), Toucheng (頭城) and Luodong (羅東) in waters ranging between 10cm and 50cm deep.
The CEOC said that between dawn on Sunday and 9pm on Monday, Hansi (寒溪) in Dongshan Township received 1,121mm of rain, the highest figure in the country, followed by 1,046mm in Sansing and 949mm in Datong Township’s Nioudou Village (牛鬥).
Other areas affected by the storm were Hejhong (和中) in Hualien County’s Sioulin Township (秀林), which received 671mm of rain, and Rueifang (瑞芳) in Taipei County, which recorded rainfall of 444mm.
The Council of Agriculture issued landslide red alerts for 109 areas in Yilan and Hualien counties.
Parma weakened to a tropical storm from a typhoon after its periphery touched the southern tip of Taiwan on Monday.
The Central Weather Bureau reported that as of 5:30pm yesterday, the storm was centered 370km south of Eluanbi (鵝鑾鼻) at the southern tip of Taiwan and was moving south at a speed of 8kph.
The bureau maintained its sea warning after lifting its land warning the previous night.
Under the joint influence of the storm’s outer rim and the northeast monsoon, the weather bureau forecast Hualien County would see precipitation rise to between 800mm and 1,200mm in mountainous areas and between 500mm and 700mm in lowland areas.
The bureau warned residents in the northeast and east to remain on alert for torrential rain.
Wu Tai-cheng (吳泰成), the head of the Central Personnel Administration, said the minimum level of precipitation for declaring school and office closures had been set tentatively at 350mm per day.
“Basically, local city or county governments can announce class or office closures in the event that 350mm of precipitation is recorded in a single day in areas under their jurisdiction,” Wu said.
Wu was responding to a suggestion by Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Lu Shiow-yen (盧秀燕) that the Cabinet include precipitation as one of the factors for local governments to decide whether to close schools and offices.
Later, Premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) voiced support for Lu’s suggestion, adding that the risk of mudslides should be a factor in addition to wind strength.
Meanwhile, Minister of the Interior Jiang Yi-huah (江宜樺) dismissed allegations by KMT Legislator Lo Shu-lei (羅淑蕾) that costly communication equipment has gone unused by the National Fire Agency (NFA) during this typhoon season.
Lo said the NFA spent NT$1.5 billion (US$46.6 million) between 2003 and 2005 in purchasing satellite communications, microwave communications, portable satellite communications and 12 communication vehicles, but the equipment went unused because of the lack of qualified staff to operate it.
The NFA sent 28 staffers to Italy and France to learn to operate the equipment, but only two are still at the NFA office, she said.
Jiang said that during this typhoon season, five communication vehicles were in normal operation in Yilan, Hualien and Pingtung counties.
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