The government is proactive about resolving the issues facing the Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport MRT line, the Ministry of Transportation and Communications (MOTC) said yesterday, adding that the line will not begin operations until it is certified to be safe.
The ministry made the statement after a committee it formed last month announced on Saturday that most problems facing the line have been addressed and it can begin operations soon.
Before President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) administration took office on May 20, Taoyuan Metro Corp had identified 4,522 abnormalities that occurred during the tests conducted by the Bureau of High Speed Rail and Marubeni Corp, the Japanese contractor in charge of building the line’s signaling system.
The metro company was at the time headed by Ho Nuan-hsuan (何煖軒), now the chairman of China Airlines.
A suggestion that the ministry launch the line under safety conditions while contractors gradually meet contractual standards has drawn skepticism.
The same suggestion was allegedly made by the previous administration, but it was rejected by Ho and Taoyuan Mayor Cheng Wen-tsan (鄭文燦), as the two insisted that contractors meet operations standards stated in the contract before inspection and acceptance of the system.
The committee’s announcement caused some people to question how the administration was able to address the large number of problems in such a short time, with some saying that the Taoyuan City Government accepted the proposal that it previously denied because it can launch the system and claim the public construction as its own accomplishment.
MOTC Deputy Minister Wang Kwo-tsai (王國材) said the administration was simply more active in addressing the problems.
The ministry had failed to resolve the dispute between Marubeni and its subcontractor Siemens, Wang said.
As Siemens was not able to enter the construction site to address the system’s errors due to the dispute, the system’s reliability was less than 70 percent, he added.
The committee has been engaged in professional discussions of the problems, Wang said, adding that the number of abnormalities was reduced from 4,522 to 25.
He also said that reliability was raised to 98 percent.
The line would be launched after its reliability reaches 99 percent and its safety is certified by a third party, Wang said.
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