Taipei Deputy Mayor Charles Lin (林欽榮) yesterday rebutted charges that he had personally approved the Taipei Dome’s fire evacuation design during his tenure as director-general of the Ministry of the Interior’s Construction and Planning Agency.
Lin chairs a Taipei City Government safety inspection committee which issued a report last week questioning the evacuation plans of the Dome, calling for the demolition of either the Dome itself or its neighboring shopping mall.
On Wednesday, Deputy Minister of the Interior Jonathan Chen (陳純敬) dismissed the city government’s report, saying that Lin himself had been the director-general of the Construction and Planning Agency when Dome contractor Farglory Land Development Co (遠雄建設) applied for verification of its fire prevention and evacuation performance design plans. He added that Farglory received approval after review and assessment by agency experts using internationally approved verification tools.
“Review and approval of the Taipei Dome’s fire evacuation design were all conducted during the tenure of [former Taipei Construction and Planning Agency director-general] Yeh Shih-wen (葉世文), who oversaw the substantive investigation and issued verification approval,” Lin said yesterday.
In a press release late on Wednesday night, Lin accused the ministry of “deliberately distorting the truth” about his involvement, while “sacrificing the safety of city residents for the sake of corporate interests.”
He said that although low-ranking agency officials had held a preliminary meeting on the Taipei Dome fire evacuation design plans during his tenure as director-general, no conclusion was reached and Lin himself had not participated in the meeting.
He reiterated that current regulatory standards used by the agency failed to take into account the Dome project’s unique circumstances, with the city’s “performance review” demonstrating the crucial influence of using accurate “parameters” to analyze complicated evacuation plans.
He stated that the parameters used by the city government’s analysis reflect international standards, calling on the central government to minimize “drivel” and instead directly address the parameters’ suitability.
Lin declined to respond to Farglory charges that Taipei 101 evacuation plans would be failed under city standards, using the Mandarin idiom that Taipei 101 was a “sky dragon” while the Taipei Dome was an “earth tiger” to illustrate the differences between the two cases. He added that he had not overseen the Taipei 101 case in any official role.
Meanwhile, Construction and Planning Agency Director-General Hsu Wun-long (許文龍) yesterday said that Lin had not participated in a substantial review of the Dome project because he had accepted the position of Tainan deputy mayor soon after the review began.
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