Executive Yuan spokesperson Sun Lih-chyun (孫立群) yesterday said that it was the Taipei City Government’s decision to supply turbid water to parts of Taipei following Typhoon Soudelor.
The murky tap water some Taipei residents experienced in the aftermath of the typhoon has whipped up a political dispute between the Taipei City Government and the central government.
Sun, at a press conference after a Cabinet meeting yesterday, said Taipei Deputy Mayor Teng Chia-chi (鄧家基) claimed during the meeting that it was the city government’s decision to supply murky tap water.
Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) on Tuesday said that the decision over whether to continue supplying water despite its turbidity instead of cutting supplies was “made after weighing different options, and found to be the least damaging.”
Council of Agriculture Minister Chen Bao-ji (陳保基) yesterday said that it is not unusual for typhoons to degrade water quality, “but the key lies in the subsequent handling of water put into supply and the measures taken to stabilize its quality.”
Turbidity in tap water usually drops sharply between 12 and 20 hours after an initial spike, so a temporary water outage can reduce the possibility of contaminating the water supply, Chen said, adding that uncontaminated water often flushes out the turbidity while supplies are suspended.
“Many other cities and counties have also had to deal with contamination, and they have used this technique successfully,” Chen said.
Sun said that murky river water and murky tap water are two different issues that are not always connected.
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