Kaohsiung residents and environmentalists yesterday protested a proposed freeway project ahead of its environmental review, saying the freeway would be situated on an active fault line and demanding that the review be halted until a complete geological survey has been completed.
Protesters gathered in front of the Environmental Protection Administration building in Taipei to oppose the Freeway No. 7 project, a 23km section connecting the city’s Siaogang (小港), Daliao (大寮) and Renwu (仁武) districts, designed to divert rising traffic volume surrounding the Port of Kaohsiung.
They said that although the freeway would be situated in a geologically unstable area, geological surveys have not been undertaken, despite repeated demands, while there have also been procedural flaws in the review process.
Photo: Chen Ping-hung, Taipei Times
Chien Chih-Chiang (簡志強), director of a self-help group, said the Ministry of Transportation and Communications, which is proposing the project, has not completed a geological survey or proposed response measures to soil solidification, but instead has issued a document claiming an assessment would be conducted.
“The Cishan (旗山) fault is an active fault system and the Legislative Yuan has requested that [the authorities] conduct surveys in the area. We demand that the project’s review be halted until the Central Geological Survey completes its research,” Chien said.
The Environmental Impact Assessment Act (環境影響評估法) states that practical alternatives to a proposed project should be reviewed by an environmental impact assessment committee to determine whether the proposed project is the optimal choice, but the ministry, in a project plan submitted for yesterday’s review, had rejected two alternatives proposed in earlier reviews, Taiwan Water Resources Protection Union spokesperson Chen Jiau-hua (陳椒華) said.
The two alternatives included construction at Guangming Road (光明路) in Daliao and the other to the west of the Gaoping River (高屏溪), but the ministry said the two alternatives were dramatically different from the freeway project and should be treated as new project proposals, refusing to consider them viable alternatives.
In the project plan, the ministry states that the review committee has already finished discussions concerning the topography, geology and soil structure, but the environmental groups disputed that and asked the administration to release audio recordings of the alleged discussions.
Review committee member Lee Yu-ming (李育明) said the discussions on topography, geology and soil structure are still ongoing.
Environmental groups paralyzed the review process using a series of procedural strategies and the meeting was later suspended with no outcome agreed.
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:
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