President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday pledged to increase firefighter numbers and allocate funds to upgrade equipment.
Tsai made the promise at the opening ceremony of a nationwide contest for career and volunteer firefighters in Nantou County, where their firefighting skills were tested.
The winning teams received trophies and cash prizes from NT$100,000 to NT$300,000 to purchase new firefighting equipment.
Tsai said that career and volunteer firefighters are the most important and indispensable heroes when it comes to disaster relief.
Their hard work “was particularly felt in the aftermath of the Hualien earthquake in February and the flooding in southern Taiwan in August,” Tsai said. “The minds of Taiwanese have been imprinted with images of your attentiveness to duties, your devotion and your heroic behavior.”
On Feb. 6, a magnitude 6 earthquake 18.3km northeast of Hualien County Hall toppled four buildings, killing 17 people and injuring more than 280, while days of heavy rain in late August brought flooding to several cities and counties in the south, with thousands of people displaced.
Tsai said the government would not be able to minimize the impact of disasters and accidents without reliable firefighters, adding that last year alone, they were dispatched to fires more than 47,000 times, made 1.1 million emergency transportation trips and transported more than 890,000 people to hospitals.
To enhance firefighting and emergency capabilities, starting next year, the government is to increase the number of career firefighters by 3,000 every five years and invest more than NT$500 million (US$16.1 million) to equip them with the most advanced gear, Tsai said.
She also pledged another NT$500 million to increase volunteer firefighter numbers and purchase better equipment for them.
“These measures are our promises to career and volunteer firefighters, that we will safeguard you in the line of duty,” Tsai said.
From 1997 to last year, 74 firefighters were killed in the line of duty, while 2,687 sustained work-related injuries, National Fire Agency statistics showed.
Last month, 35-year-old firefighter Tsai Pei-sheng (蔡倍昇) died an hour after he was found unconscious during a rescue mission in Kaohsiung’s Cieding District (茄萣).
In April, six firefighters were killed at a factory fire in Taoyuan’s Pingjhen District (平鎮).
As of August, there were 15,071 career firefighters, or about one for every 1,564 people in Taiwan, agency data showed.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods