About 20 firefighters and labor rights advocates yesterday protested outside the Executive Yuan in Taipei, calling for the Council of Agriculture (COA) to fulfill last year’s promise to take responsibility for the capture of dangerous snakes and bees.
“The tasks of firefighters are fire prevention, disaster relief and emergency care,” National Association for Firefighters’ Rights vice president Yu Tzung-han (余宗翰) said. “Helping people capture bees and snakes should be the work of local agricultural departments, but none of them want to take responsibility, instead asking untrained firefighters to risk their lives.”
Firefighters last year handled 85,099 cases nationwide involving dangerous animals, almost double the 48,019 cases involving fires, association member Lan Yu-chieh (藍毓傑) said.
Photo: CNA
One firefighter’s leg was amputated last year because it was infected after a snake bite, while another was hospitalized early this year after he was bitten by a cobra, Lan said.
The council has budgeted NT$420 million (US$13.9 million) annually for dangerous animal captures from next year to 2020 and could subsidize 30 percent of local agencies’ costs to perform the work, an official document published last month showed.
However, local departments have been reluctant to retake responsibility for the work, citing insufficient funding, the association said.
“Money is absolutely not the problem. The problem is officials turning a blind eye to the issue,” Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Apollo Chen (陳學聖) said, adding that he would seriously scrutinize the central government’s budget for next year.
“I will ask the National Fire Agency to direct local fire departments to ‘say no’ to the capture work from next year,” New Power Party caucus convener Hsu Yung-ming (徐永明) said.
The Cabinet has received the council’s budget proposal, and Premier Lin Chuan (林全) is scheduled to render a final decision by the end of the month, Executive Yuan Department of Economics, Energy and Agriculture Deputy Director Lin Huang-chiao (林煌喬) said.
Later yesterday, the protesters marched from the Executive Yuan to the council, where they got into an altercation with an official.
Council Forestry Bureau Deputy Director-General Yang Hong-chi (楊宏志) said that 12 local agricultural departments had taken back responsibility for capturing dangerous animals.
However, the protesters insisted that no agricultural departments had actually done so, with some allegedly pushing Yang.
Local agricultural agencies are short on personnel, with only about 50 officials employed nationwide, a bureau official said on condition of anonymity, adding that there are about 15,000 firefighters nationwide.
The protesters said they would wait for the Executive Yuan’s decision, but threatened another protest should they find it disappointing.
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