A national transportation safety and investigation agency is to be established next year to investigate accidents involving railways, highways, shipping and aviation, Aviation Safety Council Chairman Young Hong-tsu (楊宏智) said yesterday.
Young made the announcement at a meeting of the legislature’s Transportation Committee in Taipei when he was scheduled to brief lawmakers about the council’s budget for the next fiscal year.
The draft bill to establish such an agency, which would be similar to the US National Transportation Safety Board, is being reviewed by the Executive Yuan, Young said, adding that the draft bill would be sent to the Legislative Yuan for deliberation by the end of this month.
The nation currently only has the Aviation Safety Council to investigate the causes of major aviation accidents, usually involving passenger casualties or significant damage to aircraft.
Although the proposal for an independent body that would be in charge of investigating the causes of major transportation accidents has been around for years, it was not until the derailment of a Taiwan Railways Administration (TRA) Puyuma Express train in Yilan County last month that the government and lawmakers started to take the proposal seriously and decided to act upon it, he said.
Meanwhile, the public has been questioning the validity of the TRA investigation into the Puyuma Express derailment, as it is serving as both the referee and player at the same time, Young said.
Young said that 45 percent of deaths in the nation each year are caused by transportation accidents.
The agency, which would be directly supervised by the Executive Yuan, would conduct independent investigations into aviation and shipping accidents, as well as those on railways and highways, he said.
The agency would also make suggestions to all stakeholders involved in accidents to prevent them from occurring again, he added.
The annual budget allocated to the Aviation Safety Council would not be enough to cover the increase in operational costs once the new agency is established, he said.
The legislature would have to allocate extra funding to support the operation of the agency, he added.
The agency would only investigate railway or highway accidents involving at least 15 casualties, Young said.
It would undertake investigations into shipping and aviation accidents if there was one fatality or there was damage to vessels or aircraft, he said.
While it would take about two years for the agency to be fully established, Young said that the top priority would be to establish an investigative team for railway accidents.
If the agency lacks professionals at the initial stage to investigate major transportation accidents, it would seek assistance from similar agencies in other nations, he said.
The agency is expected to handle about 20 cases per year, he said.
It would have about 100 staff, with each investigative team consisting of 25 people, Young said, adding that nine to 11 commissioners would review the results of investigations.
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