Allegations over illegal amounts of pollutants in underground water supplies near a large reservoir showed no sign of blowing over yesterday after another academic and a lawmaker asked government agencies to respond to the claims.
Wushantou Reservoir in Tainan County attracted complaints from local residents after environmental organizations last Tuesday pointed to a report from the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) that said water sampled from four of 12 wells near the reservoir tested positive for chemical pollutants.
Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Tien Chiu-chin (田秋堇) yesterday called on the Water Resources Agency to conduct an in-depth analysis of public concerns in the area. She said government agencies “should demonstrate that the water is safe.”
She said that steps should be taken to reduce the amount of pollutants in the area, including those from a nearby landfill run by a company called Yong Yang.
Failure to resolve the problem could lead to serious health problems, a doctor from National Taiwan University Hospital said.
“In the long term … some of this [industrial waste] could lead to respiratory complications and problems for newborns,” Hsu Li-min (�?�) said.
In a statement released on Wednesday night, the EPA said it would not respond to the allegations until the results of an ongoing research group in the area were available. Officials said the research group was expected to deliver results from underground water tests in the area next Thursday.
Officials from the EPA and the state-run Taiwan Water Corp previously said the water was completely safe because it did not source its drinking water from the underground supplies that were sampled. They added that most of the samples did not exceed EPA standards for acceptable pollution levels in ground water.
Environmental organizations said that the more stringent drinking water standards should be used to assess the samples, not ground water standards, because the water could flow into the reservoir.
In related news, Tien and DPP Legislator Kuan Bi-ling (管碧玲) yesterday urged the government to abandon its multibillion dollar cross-region water collection plan and instead use radial collector wells, which they said are more cost effective and productive.
The DPP lawmakers said that while the government’s current plan to use Zengwun Reservoir to collect water from other areas could cost up to NT$21.1 billion, the total usable water amount collected would only be about 600,000 tonnes a day.
By using radial collector wells, the construction cost would decrease to NT$200 million for 10 wells and each unit could collect 130,000 tonnes of water per day, Tien said.
Kuan said the government plans to divert water from the Butangbunas River (布堂布那斯溪) into the reservoir. Doing so would cause water safety problems for southern Taiwan to worsen, she said.
They said that Premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) and Minister of Economic Affairs Shih Yen-hsiang (施顏祥) should personally visit the site before deciding whether to go ahead with the plan.
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) mention of Taiwan’s official name during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Wednesday was likely a deliberate political play, academics said. “As I see it, it was intentional,” National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies professor Wang Hsin-hsien (王信賢) said of Ma’s initial use of the “Republic of China” (ROC) to refer to the wider concept of “the Chinese nation.” Ma quickly corrected himself, and his office later described his use of the two similar-sounding yet politically distinct terms as “purely a gaffe.” Given Ma was reading from a script, the supposed slipup
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,
The bodies of two individuals were recovered and three additional bodies were discovered on the Shakadang Trail (砂卡礑) in Taroko National Park, eight days after the devastating earthquake in Hualien County, search-and-rescue personnel said. The rescuers reported that they retrieved the bodies of a man and a girl, suspected to be the father and daughter from the Yu (游) family, 500m from the entrance of the trail on Wednesday. The rescue team added that despite the discovery of the two bodies on Friday last week, they had been unable to retrieve them until Wednesday due to the heavy equipment needed to lift