The Aviation Safety Council (ASC) in August is to be restructured and designated as a national transportation safety council, responsible for investigating major transportation accidents, which could include the deadly Puyuma train crash in October last year, it said on Thursday.
The Legislative Yuan this month passed an amendment to the Organic Law of the Aviation Safety Council (飛航安全調查委員會組織法) to transform the agency, which is currently tasked with investigating aviation accidents, into a body that probes marine, railway, highway and aviation transportation accidents.
The amendment came after 18 people were killed and 210 injured in the derailment of eastbound Puyuma Express Train No. 6432 near Sinma (新馬) Train Station in Yilan County on Oct. 21 last year, the deadliest railway accident in Taiwan in nearly three decades.
Photo: Chu Pei-hsiung, Taipei Times
ASC Chairman Young Hong-tsu (楊宏智), who has a background in engineering, said that once the new council begins operations, its first order of business would be whether to begin a new investigation of the derailment.
It is highly likely the investigation will be reopened, as the report released by the Cabinet’s investigation task force in November last year was insufficiently comprehensive and widely questioned, Young said.
If a new investigation is launched, it would involve a full-scale inspection of all Puyuma express trains and the entire Taiwan Railways Administration system using a more rigorous scientific methodology to better determine what caused the derailment, he said.
The report on the incident presented by the Cabinet was based on insufficient evidence due to the low sophistication of on-site investigative mechanisms, he said.
Furthermore, the report concluded that the cause was speeding, but failed to explore the reasons for the speeding, he said.
Prosecutors in New Taipei City yesterday indicted 31 individuals affiliated with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) for allegedly forging thousands of signatures in recall campaigns targeting three Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) lawmakers. The indictments stem from investigations launched earlier this year after DPP lawmakers Su Chiao-hui (蘇巧慧) and Lee Kuen-cheng (李坤城) filed criminal complaints accusing campaign organizers of submitting false signatures in recall petitions against them. According to the New Taipei District Prosecutors Office, a total of 2,566 forged recall proposal forms in the initial proposer petition were found during the probe. Among those
ECHOVIRUS 11: The rate of enterovirus infections in northern Taiwan increased last week, with a four-year-old girl developing acute flaccid paralysis, the CDC said Two imported cases of chikungunya fever were reported last week, raising the total this year to 13 cases — the most for the same period in 18 years, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said yesterday. The two cases were a Taiwanese and a foreign national who both arrived from Indonesia, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The 13 cases reported this year are the most for the same period since chikungunya was added to the list of notifiable communicable diseases in October 2007, she said, adding that all the cases this year were imported, including 11 from
China might accelerate its strategic actions toward Taiwan, the South China Sea and across the first island chain, after the US officially entered a military conflict with Iran, as Beijing would perceive Washington as incapable of fighting a two-front war, a military expert said yesterday. The US’ ongoing conflict with Iran is not merely an act of retaliation or a “delaying tactic,” but a strategic military campaign aimed at dismantling Tehran’s nuclear capabilities and reshaping the regional order in the Middle East, said National Defense University distinguished adjunct lecturer Holmes Liao (廖宏祥), former McDonnell Douglas Aerospace representative in Taiwan. If
The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) today condemned the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) after the Czech officials confirmed that Chinese agents had surveilled Vice President Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) during her visit to Prague in March last year. Czech Military Intelligence director Petr Bartovsky yesterday said that Chinese operatives had attempted to create the conditions to carry out a demonstrative incident involving Hsiao, going as far as to plan a collision with her car. Hsiao was vice president-elect at the time. The MAC said that it has requested an explanation and demanded a public apology from Beijing. The CCP has repeatedly ignored the desires
RSS