A total of 314 bridges, or nearly one in four, in Kaohsiung have been found to have been damaged, inspections carried out after the magnitude 6.4 earthquake that rocked southern Taiwan on Feb. 6 have found.
Five of the 314 damaged bridges are to be dismantled and rebuilt, and repairing and rebuilding the more than 300 damaged bridges would cost an estimated NT$300 million (US$8.94 million), the Kaohsiung Public Works Bureau’s Maintenance Office said yesterday.
Out of a total of about 1,300 bridges in the special municipality, after the earthquake the Maintenance Office began to inspect 770 that were older and potentially posed problems.
It discovered that 314 of them had suffered varying degrees of damage.
The five most severely damaged structures are Wenan Bridge and Haiwei Bridge in Mituo District (彌陀), Dongfeng Bridge and Dunzihjiao Bridge in Neimen District (內門) and Chonghua Bridge in Meinong District (美濃) — where the earthquake was centered.
The five bridges were sealed off after the quake.
The office said it has received the funding to rebuild the bridges and plans to do so before the end of this year.
The Ministry of Culture last week said that a total of 34 historic monuments were damaged in the earthquake, 23 of them in Tainan, including the city landmark Confucius Temple (孔廟) and Official God of War Temple (祀典武廟).
The ministry began repairing the monuments immediately after the earthquake, with the repair work estimated at NT$520 million, Minister of Culture Hung Meng-chi (洪孟啟) said.
A total of 117 people in Tainan died in the earthquake, 115 of whom were killed in the collapse of the 17-story Weiguan Jinlong building in the city’s Yongkang District (永康).
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