Everybody likes to save money, individuals and businesses alike. The government should do the same, especially by cutting pork-barrel projects and other waste. However, saving money should not come at the risk of losing lives.
This is especially true when it comes to firefighting.
So it was very disturbing to find out earlier this week that Taiwan Power Co (Taipower) has been taking penny-pinching to an absurd extreme by being willing to award the tender for firefighting responsibilities at the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant to the sole bidder, a firm with no firefighting experience. Taipower dropped requirements that the winning bidder must have experience, because that would have driven up the cost of the contract.
Sheer madness.
Although the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant will hopefully never need to bring its firefighting brigade into action, one would still hope it would be fully staffed, fully trained and well equipped.
Accidents do happen.
For example, the firefighting brigade at the Third Nuclear Power Plant was summoned in June last year when a fire broke out at one of the start-up transformers. That blaze was put out by the automatic fire suppression system, so the plant’s firefighting brigade might have appeared superfluous.
However, things went less well for the plant’s brigade eight years earlier, when salt deposits caused all four main power transmission lines in the Fengkang and Hengchun area to fail, triggering a blackout at the power plant that lasted a little over two hours and became the nation’s most serious nuclear-plant incident to date.
When heavy smoke was reported in the control building, the plant’s fire brigade couldn’t enter the building because of a lack of lighting and ventilation equipment. It had to call the local fire department in Hengchun to request additional equipment.
The news about the tender bid for the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant came hot on the heels of the announcement that the contract to fight fires in the Hsuehshan Tunnel was won by a nearby gardening company. Granted, gardeners do need to use water hoses, but somehow that doesn’t seem to be enough of a qualification for being a first responder to a crisis in one of the world’s longest tunnels.
The 50-person-strong Shang Hung Gardening will have to double in size to fulfill the contract by hiring almost 50 new employees. It will also have to ensure the upkeep of firefighting equipment and staff three stations in the tunnel 24 hours a day.
It’s hard not to compare these examples of risky penny-pinching with the example of semiconductor manufacturer UMC, which took the initiative in 1994 to establish its own fire department, staffed by a dozen or so full-time employees, backed up by more than 100 trained volunteer firefighters from the firm’s employees. UMC likes to boast it has the most highly educated fire brigade in the nation, since many of its volunteers have at least a master’s degree.
The National Fire Agency’s local departments provide the necessary backup for private and state-run companies’ brigades, but we do not need to make its job harder or more dangerous by allowing unqualified private firms to become the first responders at critical sites. If UMC can afford to form, train and equip a fire brigade on its own, we should demand nothing less from state-run corporations.
Privatization and outsourcing is all the rage among governments at all levels around the world. However, such cost-saving measures should not place human lives at risk, as Taipower and the government appear wont to do.
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