On June 27, an explosion and resulting fire at a Color Play Asia party at Formosa Fun Coast (八仙海岸) in New Taipei City’s Bali District (八里) injured hundreds of people, some of whom have since died, while others remain in critical condition. This tragedy serves to remind us that when the capacity of a building or facility or the intensity of an activity are going to exceed the scope within which the existing medical services can protect the public’s health and safety, then the facilities in question should not be built or put into use.
Preventing disasters is better than dealing with the aftermath. Only if we pay heed to this can we prevent such tragic and regrettable loss of life from happening again.
The developer of the Taipei Dome project, Farglory Land Development Co (遠雄建設), carried out a computer simulation to test its evacuation plan for the dome complex, but the layout and estimates of escape routes and evacuation speeds employed in the simulation did not comply with the real behavior of people who are trying to escape the scene of an accident.
This means the developer’s evacuation plan cannot give a sufficient guarantee of safety to users of the dome and the surrounding buildings, which include a movie theater complex, shopping center, hotel and offices.
In view of this critical flaw, the Taipei City Government should rule that the gap analysis of the environmental impact assessment submitted by Farglory fails to meet the required standards. Only then would it be possible to ensure that a disaster leading to a large number of fatalities never occurs at the Taipei Dome.
The Taipei City Government used different software to simulate an emergency scenario, and its simulation showed that the speed and safety of crowd evacuation from the site would not be sufficient to ensure the safety of the dome complex when it is filled to capacity.
Both these computer simulations are unrealistic. The main problem is that they deal with people as if they were robots and fail to consider the evacuation psychology of real human beings. They do not take into account the differing behaviors of different kinds of people, such as baseball fans, shoppers, hotel guests and office workers, in the event of a disaster. The “psychological delay” in evacuation time that results from these behavioral factors is something that computers cannot simulate.
Furthermore, the simulations do not take into account the “chaotic delay” in evacuation time that is caused by the intersections and collisions that take place between escape and rescue access routes in the wake of a disaster, when emergency services are trying to take injured people to hospital.
These two kinds of delay both happened following the water park disaster, making emergency treatment and evacuation more difficult and increasing the resulting number of deaths and injuries.
Even more worrying is the fact that the emergency services of Taipei and northern Taiwan were exposed as insufficient when they were trying to provide emergency care for victims of the Color Play Asia disaster. The number of people attending future events at the Taipei Dome could be 50 to 100 times as many as were present at that party.
Based on this estimate, Taipei’s existing emergency rescue system would probably be overloaded if it were called upon to provide rescue and emergency care for the huge number of injuries that could occur in the event of a major accident at the Taipei Dome. The Color Play Asia disaster would pale in comparison.
The Taipei City Government must tell Farglory to reduce the capacity of the dome complex and limit the ways in which of some of the buildings would be used. Only if this is done can Taipei residents be provided with a dome complex that they can use safely.
Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) should move as quickly as possible toward a policy of demolishing the dome and restoring the open space on which it was built. Ko should boldly adopt the policies that are necessary to create a safe leisure environment for Taipei residents and future generations.
Let us also hope that central government ministries and the banks providing syndicated loans for the project can give the Taipei City Government the legal and financial help it needs to find a lawful way of escaping from the lethal limitations of the existing high-risk contract governing the construction and operation of the dome complex, so that Taipei’s residents and government can soon be released from the Taipei Dome’s public safety pitfalls.
If the authorities fail to implement the correct policies and instead do nothing and let things continue as they have been, the Color Play Asia tragedy might just be a prelude to a future disaster at the Taipei Dome. That gloomy prospect demands the utmost caution in dealing with the Taipei Dome issue.
Chan Chang-chuan is vice dean of the College of Public Health at National Taiwan University and director of the university’s International Health Center.
Translated by Julian Clegg
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