Greater Kaohsiung authorities have ordered LCY Chemical Corp, the company suspected of being responsible for the deadly gas explosions that rocked the city last week, to shut down one of its plants until safety improvements are made, a city official said yesterday.
Tseng Wen-sheng (曾文生), head of the city’s Economic Development Bureau, said that LCY Chemical’s Dashe (大社) plant in Kaohsiung should be shut down immediately to conduct an overall review of the production facility and the pipeline network connected to it to improve safety.
Tseng cited the Ministry of Economic Affairs’ order to shut down petrochemical plants belonging to the Formosa Plastics Group in Yunlin County’s Mailiao Industrial zone in 2011 in the wake of major fires as a precedent for the move.
Photo: Huang Hsu-lei, Taipei Times
“The public is uneasy [after the July 31 explosions]. The government should do something and not let angry people lay siege to the plant,” Tseng said.
He said that although the pipeline that is thought to have leaked propene and suspected of triggering the explosions was not within the boundaries of LCY Chemical’s Dashe property, it should be considered an extension of the plant and fall under its safety management.
The series of powerful explosions that began just minutes before midnight on July 31 killed 30 people, injured more than 300 and ripped up roads along the pipeline’s route in downtown Kaohsiung.
LCY Chemical responded that it would cooperate with the city government’s order to inspect its production facility and improve the management of the pipelines both inside and outside the plant used to transport its raw materials.
The Dashe plant, which produces propene, also known as polypropylene, is one of four production facilities LCY Chemical has in the Kaohsiung metropolitan area, according to the company’s Web site. It also has a storage terminal in the city’s port area.
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