More than 400 cases of irrigation water theft have been reported over the past month in Tainan, where first-stage rationing is being implemented due to a water shortage, the Chia-Nan Irrigation Association said yesterday.
The amount of rainfall in the region is only half of what it was last year, the association said.
Due to the shortage, a scheme has been introduced in which farmers are supplied with irrigation water for seven consecutive days, but do not have water for the next seven days. As the first rice harvest season is about to end, irrigation water would be supplied for the last time on June 4.
Photo: Copy by Wu Chun-feng, Taipei Times
The association on May 1 set up a team to patrol its irrigation sources. The team reported more than 400 cases of water theft this month in which some farmers allegedly stole water by inserting additional tubes in the middle of irrigation waterways, an anonymous association member said.
The association tends to warn people stealing water, instead of calling the police, unless they are really hostile, the member said.
The water thefts often occur in the northbound and southbound waterways flanking Wushantou Reservoir (烏山頭水庫), with the northbound waterway reaching Chiayi County’s Puzih City (朴子) and the southbound one reaching Tainan’s Sinhua District (新化), the member added.
The irrigation water for farmland in Tainan and Chiayi County comes from Wushantou Reservoir and Zengwen Reservoir (曾文水庫).
As of yesterday, Zengwen Reservoir had 24.46 million metric tonnes of water, 5.39 percent of its total capacity; the Wushantou Reservoir had 13.41 million tonnes, 17.13 percent of its total, data from the Ministry of Economic Affairs’ Water Resources Agency showed.
In other news, the Central Weather Bureau yesterday said the hot weather is expected to continue until today with temperatures forecast to be between 35 and 36 degrees Celsius before the westerly wind drops tomorrow to bring temperatures down slightly to between 33 and 34 degrees.
A front is expected to arrive in Taiwan on Tuesday next week, but it is unlikely to be strong enough to disperse all of the heat felt in the previous days, Bureau forecaster Chen Yi-hsiu (陳伊秀) said.
Additional reporting by CNA
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
RSS