The Ministry of Education has instructed schools at all levels to carry out disaster drills before the end of June as part of the government’s effort to improve disaster preparedness, Minister of Education Wu Ching-ji (吳清基) said on Thursday.
The drills will be one of the criteria used to evaluate schools’ performance, Wu said after a meeting called by President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) on Thursday in response to the March 11 earthquake and tsunami in Japan.
The ministry also instructed schools located near nuclear power plants in New Taipei City (新北市) and Pingtung County to conduct regular nuclear disaster drills to raise awareness about the potential for a nuclear accident, he said.
Photo: CNA
Wu said current regulations require that schools be built to withstand earthquakes measuring up to a magnitude 6, but the standard would be raised to a magnitude 7 — the highest level on the Central Weather Bureau’s scale — to guard against schools collapsing in the event of a powerful earthquake.
Deputy Minister of Education Chen Yi-hsing (陳益興) said emergency protective measures would be initiated at all schools if radioactive contaminants from Japan’s recent nuclear accident began to affect Taiwan.
These measures would include suspending all outdoor activities, closing windows tightly, wearing raincoats, rain gear and masks, and refraining from consuming water and food that had been exposed to the air, Chen said.
Separately, Premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) said that architects and building structure experts would be invited to study how strong an earthquake would need to be in order to knock down the Presidential Office, which was constructed in 1919.
The biggest earthquake to strike Taiwan was the magnitude 7.6 temblor that ravaged central Taiwan in 1999.
He said he did not know whether the Japanese-built building would be able to resist a quake bigger than that.
The premier added that he would launch a comprehensive review into the quake-resistance level of other major buildings around the country.
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
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
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