The Taipei City Government has ordered all four major natural gas companies operating in the city to inspect all of their pipelines within a week, following reports of two gas leaks in Zhongshan (中山) and Wanhua (萬華) districts that came on the heels of the gas explosions that devastated Greater Kaohsiung last week.
Residents of Wanhua’s Guoguang Community reportedly smelled leaking gas for five consecutive days last week. However, after calling the Great Taipei Gas Corp to complain, they were told: “Smelling a little gas will not hurt you.”
When the blasts rocked Greater Kaoshiung’s Cianjhen (前鎮) and Lingya (苓雅) districts on Thursday night and early Friday, killing at least 28 and injuring 286, the Guoguang residents became even more alarmed and telephoned the borough warden on Friday morning to demand a response.
“Is the city government going to wait until there are corpses before taking action?” one resident said.
In response, Great Taipei Gas engineer Chang Yung-chang (張永章) said the company had inspected the site of the reported leaks several days ago and found no cause for immediate danger, adding that the firm had sealed the leaks and plans to change the pipes today.
However, Taipei City Councilor Angela Ying (應曉薇) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lambasted the company as callous, saying it should have sent an emergency team to handle the matter the moment it received the complaints.
In a similar incident, the city police and fire departments also received reports of a suspected gas leak near No. 158 Songjiang Road at 9am on Friday. The gas company dug up the road to conduct an inspection and found minor leakage, though it declared the pipe to be in the green after carrying out some maintenance work.
Also on Friday, Taipei Deputy Mayor Chen Hsiung-wen (陳雄文) led an inspection of a gas storage unit in Neihu District (內湖) and said that the underground gas pipelines criss-crossing Taipei carried low-pressure gas and did not transport any chemical substances.
A disaster like the Greater Kaohsiung blasts would not occur in Taipei, Chen said, adding that the city’s major gas suppliers were being made to inspect all their pipelines within the week.
Greater Taipei Gas vice general manager Huang Chao-chi (黃朝枝) said during the Neihu inspection that the company has electronic surveillance systems in place that oversee the flow, volume and temperature of the gas at each pressure regulation station.
The systems alert the company immediately of any change in these factors so it can shut down the valves enabling gas distribution remotely to contain any potential damage, Huang said.
The company checks its high-pressure pipes once a month, its medium-pressure pipes once every six months and its low-pressure pipes once a year, Huang said, adding that it replaces them on a regular basis according to the amount of corrosion or rust they have incurred.
In related news, a gas leak was detected yesterday at a liquified petroleum gas fueling station in New Taipei City’s Sanchong District (三重), though officials said there were no safety concerns after emergency measures were implemented by the New Taipei City Fire Bureau and the station’s operator.
The leak was reported at about 5am by area residents who reported an unusual smell coming from the gas station operated by state-owned gasoline supplier CPC Corp, according to the fire bureau.
Firefighters said they diluted the concentrated liquefied petroleum gas in the air by spraying water to reduce any immediate danger from any leak, which could have resulted from an aged or malfunctioning valve in the station’s pipelines.
The operator of the station also turned off the main gas valve to ensure the area remains safe, and will replace the broken component, fire bureau officials said.
Additional reporting by Tsai Ya-hua, Yeh Kuan-yu and Staff writer, with CNA
GREAT POWER COMPETITION: Beijing views its military cooperation with Russia as a means to push back against the joint power of the US and its allies, an expert said A recent Sino-Russian joint air patrol conducted over the waters off Alaska was designed to counter the US military in the Pacific and demonstrated improved interoperability between Beijing’s and Moscow’s forces, a national security expert said. National Defense University associate professor Chen Yu-chen (陳育正) made the comment in an article published on Wednesday on the Web site of the Journal of the Chinese Communist Studies Institute. China and Russia sent four strategic bombers to patrol the waters of the northern Pacific and Bering Strait near Alaska in late June, one month after the two nations sent a combined flotilla of four warships
‘LEADERS’: The report highlighted C.C. Wei’s management at TSMC, Lisa Su’s decisionmaking at AMD and the ‘rock star’ status of Nvidia’s Huang Time magazine on Thursday announced its list of the 100 most influential people in artificial intelligence (AI), which included Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) chairman and chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家), Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) and AMD chair and CEO Lisa Su (蘇姿丰). The list is divided into four categories: Leaders, Innovators, Shapers and Thinkers. Wei and Huang were named in the Leaders category. Other notable figures in the Leaders category included Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Meta CEO and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Su was listed in the Innovators category. Time highlighted Wei’s
EVERYONE’S ISSUE: Kim said that during a visit to Taiwan, she asked what would happen if China attacked, and was told that the global economy would shut down Taiwan is critical to the global economy, and its defense is a “here and now” issue, US Representative Young Kim said during a roundtable talk on Taiwan-US relations on Friday. Kim, who serves on the US House of Representatives’ Foreign Affairs Committee, held a roundtable talk titled “Global Ties, Local Impact: Why Taiwan Matters for California,” at Santiago Canyon College in Orange County, California. “Despite its small size and long distance from us, Taiwan’s cultural and economic importance is felt across our communities,” Kim said during her opening remarks. Stanford University researcher and lecturer Lanhee Chen (陳仁宜), lawyer Lin Ching-chi
When Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) was wooing leaders from across Africa with a banquet on Wednesday night, King Mswati III of Eswatini was notably absent. That is because the kingdom — about the size of New Jersey and with just 1.2 million people — is one of Taiwan’s remaining dozen diplomatic allies. That means Eswatini does not participate in Xi’s Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, the centerpiece of China’s diplomatic outreach to Africa, which was held in Beijing this week. The landlocked nation, which sits between Mozambique and South Africa, is the last holdout in Beijing’s seven-plus decade mission to make Africa