Traffic in the Hsuehshan Tunnel was restricted on Sunday to allow a donated heart from Yilan County to be rushed to a hospital in Taipei, the first time a lane in the tunnel had been closed for an ambulance since its inauguration in 2006.
The route from Yilan’s Yangming Hospital to the Taipei Veterans General Hospital is about 65km and includes three national freeways — freeway Nos. 5, 1 and 3.
Local newspapers reported yesterday that to get the heart to Taipei in time through the usually heavy northbound traffic on Sunday, when the speeds in the Hsuehshan Tunnel, a section of Freeway No. 5, can be as slow as 10kph, police had to cordon off the outer line of northbound traffic, the first time this had been done, to allow passage of an ambulance.
“Organ donation is more important than the average emergency,” Chiu Chung-yuan of the National Highway Police Bureau said.
The ambulance took only seven minutes to get through the 12.9km tunnel, Chiu said. The ambulance left the Yilan hospital at 10:58pm on Sunday, traveling at very high speeds with a police escort, and arrived at Taipei Veterans General Hospital at 11:37pm.
The transplant operation on a woman in her 50s began at midnight and went smoothly, according to hospital officials.
The donor, surnamed Chen, a man in his early 40s, had been pronounced brain dead earlier in the day and his family decided to donate his heart, liver, pancreas, kidneys, corneas and bone marrow, which could benefit at least seven people.
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