A NT$73 million (US$2.3 million) contract to prevent fires in one of the world’s longest tunnels was recently revealed to have been won by a small Miaoli-based gardening company with less than NT$5 million in paid-in capital.
The startup company will provide a firefighting team that will be the first line of defense, providing traffic control and emergency rescue measures in the event of an incident along the 12.9km Hsuehshan tunnel.
The three-year contract also states that the company, Shang Hung Gardening Ltd, will be required to ensure the upkeep of fire prevention equipment and hire 48 new employees and one manager, to be stationed 24 hours a day at three points along world’s fifth-longest tunnel.
The company’s operator, Huang Hung-ming (黃鴻銘), only recently acknowledged that his company, which currently has about 50 employees, had taken on a government contract of this kind.
The nearest the company has previously come to working on the national freeway system was the placement and maintenance of shrubs, hedges and flowers.
Yesterday Huang said his company was experienced enough to ensure the safety of the more than 40,000 vehicles that pass through the tunnel daily, adding that its firefighters were “very highly trained.”
“This is not high-tech stuff we are talking about here. It’s mainly about the workforce, which we have hired,” he said. “After all, we did pass all the government checks.”
The contract, which came into effect on July 1, has raised questions as to whether government outsourcing could adversely impact public safety in the five-year- old tunnel.
Since the tunnel opened there have been six cases of cars or trucks catching fire.
According to government procurement papers, Shang Hung’s bid was NT$1.4 million lower than that of another competitor, a Taipei County-based towing company, and almost NT$3 million cheaper than a government estimate of NT$75.9 million.
Expressing concerns in the legislature yesterday, Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Huang Wei-cher (黃偉哲) said he had received public complaints that safety on the Taipei-Yilan expressway could be compromised.
He said that based on information acquired by his office, the only requirement Shang Hung had for new their newly hired firefighters were that they graduated from junior high school.
“Gardening companies should bid on [Taipei City’s] Flora Expo contracts. Instead we see them bidding on fire safety contracts for Hsuehshan tunnel,” he said. “It doesn’t make sense.”
However, National Highway Bureau officials yesterday said that people should look past the name, adding that the company met all government regulations.
“We cannot control what the companies are called when they bid on our contracts ... but so far, everything has been done according to the law,” said Hsu Jheng-jhang (許鉦漳), director of the bureau’s northern region engineering office.
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