The Taipei Dome project on Monday evening passed an urban planning review at the Taipei City Government, but officials yesterday failed to answer city councilors’ questions regarding how many modifications are allowed under the approved plan and their effects.
The city government in May 2014 ordered contractor Farglory Land Development Co to stop construction due to safety concerns and unauthorized changes to the blueprints, saying that operations would only be allowed to resume after several reviews were passed.
Despite the project being stalled for several years, Farglory still failed to provide the results of computer simulations for two of six emergency evacuation scenarios at the sixth urban planning review meeting on Aug. 30.
Photo: Tu Chien-jung, Taipei Times
For the simulated evacuations, the Taipei Department of Urban Development has required that the audience must be able to leave their seats in eight minutes and exit the venue within 15 minutes.
At the seventh meeting to discuss the project’s disaster prevention and evacuation plans on Monday afternoon, Farglory again failed to pass the worst-case simulation, but later accepted the department’s suggested modifications after three hours of discussion.
The department suggested that Farglory shrink the corners of buildings in the shopping mall and cinema areas, as well as change the design of some ground-floor areas into semi-outdoor spaces, to increase the outdoor area in which people could take refuge.
While city councilors and a local borough warden who attended the meeting urged the review committee to call another meeting to review the modified plan and run the simulations again, department Commissioner Huang Ching-mao (黃景茂) on Monday announced that the committee has allowed Farglory to pass the test with the required modifications.
New Power Party (NPP) Taipei City Councilor Lin Liang-chun (林亮君) on Facebook questioned why the committee arbitrarily allowed the contractor to pass the review by making a few changes without additional simulations, saying that there were still questions left unanswered.
Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) yesterday said that if the city government wanted to arbitrarily give approval, it would not even need a seventh review meeting, adding that professional questions should be answered by experts and that as the simulation software was developed in the UK, asking the developers would be more reasonable.
“If we cannot do anything because one or two people are against it, then the Taipei City Government would not be able to push forward any urban renewal plans,” Ko said.
Social Democratic Party Taipei City Councilor Miao Po-ya (苗博雅) and NPP Taipei City Councilor Lin Ying-meng (林穎孟) questioned whether there is statistical evidence proving that adding semi-outdoor spaces would help in an evacuation.
Taipei Dome Preparatory Office Deputy Director Chen Shih-hao (陳世浩) said that as the plan was approved on Monday, he does not know exactly how much additional space would be created and that such calculations would have to be conducted and provided by Farglory, but added that the submitted plan would not have to go through another urban planning committee review.
A Farglory representative said that although the project’s design has passed urban planning review, it would still need to pass an environmental assessment, as well as obtain a new construction permit for the developer to resume building.
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