The nation’s military airlifted heavy equipment to the disaster zone along the landslide-stricken Suhua Highway area yesterday as rescuers stepped up the search for 24 people still missing five days after Typhoon Megi swept by Taiwan.
Television images showed an army helicopter taking off in pouring rain transporting an excavator to a beach in Yilan County where rescuers believe the missing may be buried.
The focus of the search was on Harula Tour Agency’s (創意旅行社) 19 members of a tourist group from China who went missing on Thursday with their Taiwanese bus driver and Taiwanese tour guide while driving along the coastal highway.
Three others in Yilan also remained unaccounted for, while the Taiwanese bus driver for Hong Tai Tour Agency (弘泰旅行社) has been declared dead after body parts found by rescuers matched his DNA.
The Harula Tour Agency’s bus has yet to be found and some accident investigators have suggested the vehicle may have plunged into the ocean from the highway, prompting navy and coastguard vessels as well as police helicopters to scan waters off Yilan.
Relatives of the 19 tourists arrived late on Monday from China and were briefed by the rescuers on the progress of the search.
Emergency workers have dug up some body parts buried under the debris of a temple swamped by mudslides.
The safety of the Suhua Highway came to the forefront once again after the accident-prone road was hit by serious landslides during Typhoon Megi last week.
Premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) said earlier in the day at the legislature that the government would begin issuing tenders for the project as soon as it passes an -environmental impact assessment.
The proposed NT$6.5 billion (US$1.519 billion) project to improve the most hazardous section of the Suhua Highway could begin next month or in December.
“After the project is evaluated under a strict and fair review, bidding and contract-awarding processes could be completed this year. The whole project is expected to be completed in 2016,” Wu said.
Fielding questions from Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Liu Chien-kuo (劉建國), Wu said the government was considering setting up landslide monitoring devices along the highway to avoid or reduce the impact of future landslides.
Late last night, when asked by reporters if the Chinese tourists who were killed in Taiwan would qualify for the same state compensation offered to Taiwanese victims, Wu said the government was still assessing whether they met the legal requirements, adding that it was also studying previous cases of Taiwanese tourists who died in China.
Wu said the government was still looking at the Act Governing the Relations between Peoples of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (台灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例) and an explanation concerning the act made by the Ministry of Justice in 2003, which said that people in China are also citizens of the Republic of China.
If Taiwanese victims of accidents in China were offered compensation, the government would consider compensating the Chinese tourists in line with the principle of reciprocity, Wu said.
At a separate setting yesterday, Minister of the Environmental Protection Administration Stephen Shen (沈世宏) said the agency would not hasten an environmental impact assessment for the Suhua Highway improvement project, despite the urgency of the project.
According to Shen, Wu was merely expressing his personal opinion when he said earlier that the project could be completed by the end of 2016.
Shen said the EPA would respect the professional opinions of experts on whether the project could pass the assessment.
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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