Around 250 passengers aboard a northbound train on Taipei’s Wenshan-Neihu MRT line were evacuated yesterday after staff at Nanjing East Road station detected a burning odor coming from cars.
The incident occurred at 8:29am when the train was at Nanjing East Road station.
As soon as station staff smelled the burning odor, “we immediately evacuated all 250 passengers on the train according to the standard operating procedure and asked them to take the next train,” Taipei Rapid Transit Corp (TRTC) spokesman Chao Hsiung-fei (趙雄飛) said. “The train was at the station, so the evacuation and the change of train all took place inside the station.”
He said the incident only caused a few minutes’ delay for passengers.
The malfunctioning train was sent to the maintenance depot in Neihu.
“The burning smell was produced by an overheated brake system,” Chao said, adding that similar incidents had happened on six previous occasions since line testing began last year.
“I can’t say if it’s exactly the same problem but technicians [from the Germany-based supplier of the brake system, Knorr-Bremse] will check it. They have just arrived in Taiwan,” he said.
In past incidents, the burning smell was triggered by friction between the brake pad and brake disk after the emergency brake intensifier on the train malfunctioned.
A report by the Taipei City Department of Rapid Transit Systems for the city council earlier this month revealed the same problem had occurred six times during the test operation period last year.
The malfunctioning parts had been sent to Knorr-Bremse for checks, however, the company did not find anything wrong with them.
The Taipei City Government has asked the TRTC to provide a detailed account of how and why the problem occurs repeatedly as soon as possible.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods