The Taipei City Government has dragged its feet in addressing school buildings that are structurally unsound, Taipei city councilors Chien Shu-pei (簡舒培) and Rosalia Wu (吳思瑤) of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) said yesterday.
“The city’s Department of Education has done nothing about many school buildings that meet demolition criteria,” Wu said.
She said that Taipei Municipal Jianguo High School’s Ziqiang building is an example of the department’s alleged massaging of dangerous building figures.
Wu said the department had not included the building on its public list of dangerous buildings marked for demolition, even though an internal investigation had found it to be a “sea-sand building.”
“Sea-sand buildings” are structures whose concrete contains cheap, ocean-sourced sand.
Salt in the sand leads to the rapid corrosion of steel used in construction, increasing the risk of building collapse during earthquakes.
“Because [the Ziqiang buildings’ structural weakness] can not be seen with the naked eye, the department has pretended it does not exist,” Wu said, adding that based on the department’s internal investigation, there are at least six other school buildings across the city that have not been placed on the list of “dangerous buildings.”
She criticized previous city administrations for dragging their feet in addressing the issue, adding that a comprehensive review of school building safety had taken eight years to complete.
Department engineering head Hsu Chiao-hua (許巧華) said the buildings met safety standards that were in place when they were constructed, but needed to be strengthened to meet heightened standards adopted in 1997.
Hsu said they were not “sea-sand” buildings.
She said that work on buildings to help them meet the new standards has dragged out because investigation and strengthening can take place only during summer breaks, and also because of the sheer number of buildings involved.
Department figures show that at least 785 of the city’s 1357 buildings failed to meet the new standards, with 123 still requiring strengthening measures.
Considering that most countries issue more than five denominations of banknotes, the central bank has decided to redesign all five denominations, the bank said as it prepares for the first major overhaul of the banknotes in more than 24 years. Central bank Governor Yang Chin-lung (楊金龍) is expected to report to the Legislative Yuan today on the bank’s operations and the redesign’s progress. The bank in a report sent to the legislature ahead of today’s meeting said it had commissioned a survey on the public’s preferences. Survey results showed that NT$100 and NT$1,000 banknotes are the most commonly used, while NT$200 and NT$2,000
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) yesterday reported the first case of a new COVID-19 subvariant — BA.3.2 — in a 10-year-old Singaporean girl who had a fever upon arrival in Taiwan and tested positive for the disease. The girl left Taiwan on March 20 and the case did not have a direct impact on the local community, it said. The WHO added the BA.3.2 strain to its list of Variants Under Monitoring in December last year, but this was the first imported case of the COVID-19 variant in Taiwan, CDC Deputy Director-General Lin Ming-cheng (林明誠) said. The girl arrived in Taiwan on
South Korea is planning to revise its controversial electronic arrival card, a step Taiwanese officials said prompted them to hold off on planned retaliatory measures, a South Korean media report said yesterday. A Yonhap News Agency report said that the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs is planning to remove the “previous departure place” and “next destination” fields from its e-arrival card system. The plan, reached after interagency consultations, is under review and aims to simplify entry procedures and align the electronic form with the paper version, a South Korean ministry official said. The fields — which appeared only on the electronic form
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) is suspending retaliation measures against South Korea that were set to take effect tomorrow, after Seoul said it is updating its e-arrival system, MOFA said today. The measures were to be a new round of retaliation after Taiwan on March 1 changed South Korea's designation on government-issued alien resident certificates held by South Korean nationals to "South Korea” from the "Republic of Korea," the country’s official name. The move came after months of protests to Seoul over its listing of Taiwan as "China (Taiwan)" in dropdown menus on its new online immigration entry system. MOFA last week
RSS