The state-run oil refiner CPC Corp, Taiwan yesterday said that it was finishing the cleanup from a ruptured pipe carrying boiler fuel oil, but the cause of the incident was still under investigation by the Industrial Technology Research Institute.
CPC vice president Chang Ray-chung (張瑞宗) said that most of the sections of Tsaolan (草濫溪) and Neikou (內溝溪) creeks in New Taipei City that were contaminated by the spill have been cleaned up.
More than 630,000 liters of oil were spilled in Shijhih District (汐止) on Monday last week.
Chang said the company was still working to clean up a flood retention pool on the Tsaolan creek and an oil build-up outside the facility’s gates.
The company is concerned that heavy rainfall would increase water levels in the retention pool and cause a further spill, he said.
The company is investigating ways to remove the oil in the pool, he said.
New Taipei City Department of Environmental Protection division head Sun Chung-wei (孫忠偉) said the company has been fined NT$6 million (US$183,318) under the Water Pollution Control Act (水污染防治法) and The Taipei Department of Environmental Protection fined the company NT$3 million, Yang said.
The company faces total fines of NT$9 million.
The department said the company has met its requirements to clean up the oil spill.
Department senior engineer Yang Wei-hsiu (楊維修) yesterday said that the company and its partners have deployed 14 ships and 156 workers to complete cleanup work along the Keelung River (基隆河).
Chang said that the company is focusing on cleanup work and has not made a decision about appealing the penalties.
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
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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
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: