Family members of the cyclist injured while participating in the Ironman Triathlon held in Keelung last Saturday accused the city government of dereliction of duty and said the family does not rule out claiming compensation for the injuries suffered.
The injured participant, Tsai Chuan-tian (蔡川典), a resident of New Taipei City, allegedly crashed into a concrete rail after his bicycle hit a pothole about 50cm long and 40cm wide, causing serious fractures to his cervical vertebrae, thoracic vertebrae and columna vertebralis.
Tsai’s elder brother said in a Facebook post that he held the Keelung City Government to blame for his younger brother’s accident which resulted in him being paralyzed from the waist down.
The city government had not inspected the route of the event and its construction department had failed to repair the road, Tsai’s brother said, adding that no government agency had shouldered the responsibility and offered to pay medical expenses, offer subsidies or even volunteer to take care of the procedures involved in the insurance claim.
The family has had to do everything itself, Tsai’s elder brother wrote on Facebook.
In response to the allegations, Keelung City Department of Education Director Lee Chun-kuo (李春國) said his agency had immediately appointed a member of staff to assist the Tsai family with legal matters, and the employee visited Tsai on a daily basis.
If it is later proven that the hole in the road is the direct cause of Tsai’s injuries, the department would help the family handle all matters and procedures required to receive national compensation, Lee said.
The city’s Zhongshan High School was commissioned to organize the triathlon. Director of the school’s department of general affairs Pu Chien-chiao (卜建喬) said the competition was outsourced to the Chinese Taipei Triathlon Association, which headed the negotiation with the insurance companies.
The participants were covered by public liability insurance, with a ceiling of NT$30,000 in medical compensation for each potential incident, Pu said, adding that the school sent an official notification to the insurance company on Thursday asking for a response within the following three days.
If public liability insurance did not cover a wide enough range of injuries, or the amount awarded in the claim was insufficient to cover the expenses of the individual, the association should be responsible for covering the rest of the costs, he said.
Meanwhile, Keelung City Government’s Urban Development Center Deputy Director Chen Chen-chien (陳振乾) said the pothole originally contained a pole which was removed in July last year, saying that the center had filled in the hole with concrete.
The concrete must have cracked under the weight of heavy trucks passing along the road, Chen said, adding that since it has been over a year since the pole was removed, the matter was under the jurisdiction of the city government’s bureau of construction, he said.
The bureau of construction’s road maintenance division head Chien Yi-che (簡翊哲) said that the urban development center had not filled in the hole with asphalt as per regulations, and the concrete had flaked away.
The center had also failed to alert the division for post-construction inspections, Chien said.
In response to Chien, Chen said concrete was an acceptable substance to use for refilling holes, adding that there was no need to make a post-construction inspection.
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