The Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) on Monday ordered a gas station in Taoyuan County’s Jhongli City (中壢) to pay NT$3.36 million (US$112,800) to 19 households as compensation for damage caused to their real estate by oil and gas leaks.
The agency said oil and gas leaks were detected at the station in 2009, causing serious ground water contamination, and as a result the local government listed the area as a groundwater pollution control site.
Nearby residents contacted the EPA’s public nuisance dispute mediation committee, saying that the leakage caused a decrease in the value of their real estate and left them without usable groundwater.
With the agreement of the gas station and the residents, the administration used the real-estate appraisal mechanism, asking real-estate appraisers to assess whether the value of real estate in the area had been affected by the case.
The appraisal results showed that although the pollution site has been decontaminated, the public nuisance dispute has caused damage to real-estate prices due to psychological factors, so the committee ruled that the gas station should be held responsible for compensating the residents’ losses, it said.
If the gas station is dissatisfied with the committee’s decision, it can appeal to the Taoyuan District Court, the committee added.
Committee chairman Lin Fou-lai (林福來) said it was the first case in which the committee had ruled on compensation for the loss of real-estate value, as previous cases were only made for damage to aquaculture or crops.
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