Transport officials said yesterday that the high-speed railway was safe even though a 6km section which cuts through Yunlin County sits on land that has subsided considerably in recent years.
The site where the elevated railway crosses Provincial Expressway No. 78 in the county has subsided by 55cm over the past seven years, according to data compiled by Taiwan High-Speed Rail Corp (THSRC), which operates the bullet train.
DIFFERENTIAL
Officials at the Bureau of Taiwan High Speed Rail under the Ministry of Transportation and Communications, however, said that the “differential settlement” — the rate of uneven settling — between adjacent piers of the railway viaduct in Yunlin remains within tolerable levels, adding that the railway’s structure and operation remained sound.
The officials said the THSRC has closely monitored the subsidence of the Yunlin section’s piers and foundations since 2004.
The differential settlement for the section crossing over Provincial Expressway No. 78 stands at 1.08/1,500 at present, far lower than the maximum permissible level of 6/1,500, the officials said.
SLOWING
They said the pace of subsidence along the Yunlin section had slowed from nearly 10cm per year in the past to 6.8cm last year because a number of deep wells were closed in the area, reducing groundwater seepage.
WELLS
Though pleased by the slower pace of subsidence, the bureau said it hoped the central and local governments would collaborate to close even more wells, including those used for aquaculture, to stop further subsidence in Yunlin County, which is known for its agriculture and aquaculture.
Echoing the bureau’s safety assurances, THSRC spokesman Ted Chia (賈先德) said the high-speed railway was safe and structurally sound.
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