People who improperly dispose of sandbags will face fines of between NT$1,200 and NT$6,000 for violating the Waste Disposal Act (廢棄物清理法), environmental protection authorities said.
Wu Tien-chi (吳天基), an Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) official in charge of waste management, drew attention to the fines after receiving reports from city and county authorities that sandbags had been dumped on roadsides after Tropical Storm Talim passed Taiwan on Wednesday last week.
“People should properly store sandbags for future use,” Wu said.
Those who are not able to store sandbags should return them to the government units that distributed them as an anti-flood precaution, he said.
In the past week, hundreds of thousands of sandbags were given away by local governments as Talim approached and the Central Weather Bureau warned of heavy rainfall.
Eagerly collected by worried residents before the storm, the bags have since become a nuisance, with many people dumping them at the sides of roads.
“They were purchased with taxpayers’ money. People should refrain from creating such waste,” a district chief in Greater Tainan said.
Greater Tainan Water Resources Bureau Director Lee Meng-yen (李孟諺) said that every year the city government allocates funds to buy sandbags, adding that so far this year the city has given away 170,000 sandbags worth about NT$1.7 million (US$56,800).
Saying that sandbags are easily ruptured if left outdoors without protection, National Cheng Kung University’s Department of Hydraulic and Ocean Engineering head Jan Chyan-deng (詹錢登) added that ruptured sandbags could leak sand into the drainage system, where it would combine with rotting organic matter to become a solid mass that could block the system.
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