The Consumer Protection Committee yesterday said that many of the nation’s top museums and arts exhibition centers failed to meet legal standards on indoor air quality and construction or fire safety requirements.
An inspection, the first time the committee collaborated with the Environmental Protection Administration to examine the indoor air quality of 15 arts and cultural exhibition spaces, determined that the National Palace Museum had a carbon dioxide concentration of 1,488 parts per million (ppm) — exceeding the legal threshold of 1,000ppm.
“When the carbon-dioxide concentration is too high, people might have difficulty breathing or become dizzy and have hot flushes. More sensitive people can also feel other types of discomfort,” Department of Air Quality Protection and Noise Control official Hsu Su-chih (徐淑芷) said.
The carbon dioxide levels detected at the National Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall and the Taipei Fine Arts Museum were also close to 1,000ppm, with the inspection conducted on weekdays, and the air quality would have been worse over weekends, senior consumer ombudsman Wang Te-ming (王德明).
The National Palace Museum’s air quality was re-tested and found to be within legal limits, Hsu said.
The administration plans to ensure that six types of indoor public spaces — museums and art galleries, banking institutions, movie theaters, karaoke venues, performance halls and gyms — meet air quality requirements starting from the middle of this month.
The managers of such spaces must submit air quality maintenance plans within the next year, conduct regular air quality examinations, and may face fines of up to NT$250,000 if carbon dioxide levels are found to exceed 1,000ppm, Hsu said.
In addition, the inspections found that the National Palace Museum, National Taiwan Museum and the Shihsanhang Museum of Archeology had faulty fire escapes, the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts had two damaged fire hoses, the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts had an insufficient number of fire extinguishers and the National Museum of History had defective emergency lights, the committee said, adding that the issues have all since been resolved.
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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