With the danger of falling tiles or debris present in about 200 buildings in Taipei, new rules on regulating building facades are to be proposed by Saturday, Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) said.
“The rules will not be made based on individual cases, but will be applicable to all cases [of problematic building facades]. Give me one week to figure them out,” he said.
Ko made the comment during a radio interview in response to an incident on Friday, in which a woman was killed and another injured when a tile fell from a four-story building on Zhongxiao E Road and hit them.
The deceased was a 40-year-old woman surnamed Wang (王), who worked at an English cram school in the building, which belongs to the Chinese-language United Daily News.
Footage taken by a surveillance camera showed that Wang was talking with another woman when she was hit on the head by the tile.
Preliminary investigation results by a construction office commissioned by the city government said that either the concrete had lost the strength required to hold the tile in place, or the tile, installed underneath an air conditioner, had been knocked loose by vibrations from the machine’s operation.
The cause of the accident is still being investigated, Taipei District Prosecutor Lin An-yun (林安耘) said.
Meanwhile, the Taipei Construction Management Office said it would fine the United Daily News NT$300,000 according to Article 77 of the Building Act (建築法), and that the property owner has 15 days to make improvements, including introducing safety measures.
Office division head Hung Te-hao (洪德豪) said the building was not on the city government’s list of dangerous structures.
United Daily News publisher George Shuang (項國寧) said his company is saddened by the regrettable incident and that it would do its best to provide Wang’s family with any aid it requires.
The company has the building’s facade inspected each year and hopes to understand what caused the tragedy, he said.
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