Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) yesterday launched an interactive survey on Facebook asking city residents to determine a safety index for the controversial Taipei Dome project.
The five-question survey presents two options for each question on the structure’s evacuation and emergency response plan, with illustrations to help respondents grasp the scenarios described in each question.
Each option is assigned a weighting of either three or 10 points.
Respondents are then asked to calculate the total score based on their choices, with the perfect score, 50, denoting the “safest” and 15, the least safe.
Likening the Dome to an “egg,” a term commonly used by Chinese-speaking groups to refer to dome arenas, the survey shows people what kind of egg they would get based on the safety level determined from their answers.
Based on the level of safety obtained in a respondent’s answers, the results range from “soft” scrambled eggs; “half-done” eggs Benedict; an “average” boiled egg; or a tiedan (鐵蛋, extremely tough) egg.
The survey asks respondents to consider fundamental issues that Ko’s administration has identified as crucial points during evacuation, but has been unable to resolve during its negotiations with project contractor Farglory Group (遠雄集團).
These include the accessibility of emergency exits, the pace at which people move and the space that should be reserved for the passage of ambulance and fire trucks in case of an emergency.
Saying that a square meter of space can usually accommodate three people at demonstrations and up to four people in MRT stations, the online survey asks respondents to picture how crowded the Taipei Dome would be during emergency evacuations and how spacious they thought the evacuation passages should be.
The poll has sparked heated discussions among netizens, eliciting thousands of responses within hours of its posting.
“Kudos [to the mayor]. Now I understand why the city government is so serious about its argument with Farglory. They should do this more often so young people can better understand [public issues],” a Facebook user named Yeh Chi-che (葉其澈) said.
“People’s pace during an evacuation should be compared with how slowly they move during New Year’s Eve celebrations,” another said.
“Since Taiwan has never had such a massive building set to be completed at the heart of a metropolis, the current safety standard is no longer sufficient to guarantee the safety of the Taipei Dome. Although the Dome conforms to the standard, that does not necessarily mean it is safe,” Ko wrote on Facebook.
He said that the Ministry of the Interior’s safety inspections on the project assessed only the complex’s preparedness against fires, but the municipal government is concerned about the site’s preparedness for several emergency scenarios.
The survey was designed after factoring in various scenarios in the hopes that a more stringent safety standards would be introduced to protect people attending events at the Dome, Ko said.
The remarks signaled a change from the attitude he adopted last week when he said that the city government had not ruled out the possibility of easing the safety standard it previously applied to the project.
The mayor has requested that the interior ministry’s Construction and Planning Agency determine a safety standard for the Taipei Dome.
The Taipei City Government has been locked in conflict with Farglory over Dome contract terms since January, with a municipal safety commission in April recommending that either the Dome or an adjacent shopping mall be demolished.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,
‘GROWING UP TOGETHER’: Jensen Huang celebrated the nation’s role in the formation of the tech firm at a Silicon Valley gathering, saying ‘Taiwan saved Nvidia’ Taiwan is in the center of the new artificial intelligence (AI) revolution, Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) told a gathering with Taiwanese on Thursday in Silicon Valley’s largest city, San Jose. Tainan-born Huang said it must be celebrated that “Taiwan is right in the middle” of a new industrial revolution in which “something new is being made, and made in a new way.” Huang recalled the manufacturing process of the RIVA 128 graphics processing unit, Nvidia’s first commercial success, describing it as the “most complicated chip at the time.” As Nvidia did not have the budget, he wrote a letter to Taiwan