The fire department of Taitung County’s Jhiben Township (知本) on Friday last week apologized to the owner of a house firefighters unwittingly burned down after being dispatched to help remove a wasp nest.
The department promised to assume full responsibility for the incident and pay reparations.
The incident began that day at about 8am when the department received a call from the owner, surnamed Chen (陳), of the two-story house on Sichang Street about the nest and dispatched a team.
However, the nest, about 60cm in diameter, was in the corner of a shoe cabinet and was difficult to access, the department said.
After receiving Chen’s permission, the firefighters attempted to remove the hive with fire.
However, embers from the torch the firefighters were using fell on a nearby bamboo fence post and started a fire, the department said, adding that a firefighter, surnamed Kuo (郭), suffered light burns to his hands at this point.
Although the firefighters immediately scrambled into action and connected their hoses to a water source, the amount of water supplied was insufficient to put out the fire, the department said. In the 15 minutes it took the team to put out the fire, the building had already been destroyed.
Neighbors, alerted to the fire by the sound of cracking glass, attempted to help put out the fire, the department added.
The department expressed its apologies to Chen over the incident and said it would assume full responsibility.
The firefighters chose to burn the nest due to its inaccessible location, the department said, adding that if they had attempted to remove the nest with water, Chen’s residence would have suffered severe water damage.
While duties such as the removal of wasp nests are not legally the department’s responsibility, it plans to continue to offer its services until there is a specific unit tasked to deal with such matters, the department added.
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
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
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