The majority of passengers traveling on the ill-fated Puyuma Express No. 6432 departing from New Taipei City’s Shulin Station and bound for Taitung County boarded at Taipei Railway Station.
The train derailed near Yilan County’s Sinma (新馬) Train Station, on the way from Luodong Railway Station to the train’s next stop, Hualien Railway Station.
By then, all the passengers traveling to Yilan County had alighted, either at Yilan or Luodong. All of those who died or were injured were bound for Hualien or Taitung.
Train accident reports have always been written by the railway administration, with experts and scholars well-acquainted with the Taiwan Railways Administration (TRA) being invited to make the occasional contribution to the investigation.
This has made it difficult to produce truly impartial, objective reports, and makes it difficult for the TRA to learn from its mistakes or determine what disciplinary measures need to be taken.
The public expects a truthful investigation, conducted by professionals, sufficient to win the trust of family members of the victims, insurance companies, the media and the public. What it does not want to see is equivocation and erroneous statements by the TRA, or for the issue to fade away once the news cycle moves on.
People need to know that the safety of passengers is guaranteed and the TRA needs to find a way to regain public confidence.
The derailment of a German Intercity Express high-speed train on June 3, 1998, killed 101 people and injured 88, the world’s deadliest high-speed rail disaster.
Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute, the largest institute of applied sciences in Europe, was charged with investigating the cause of the accident.
The investigation found that one steel tire on a wheel belonging to the first car broke apart due to metal fatigue and peeled away from the wheel, causing many other cars to derail and inflicting severe damage and loss to human life.
Taiwan should learn hard lessons from painful past experiences, either by following the US model of establishing an independent public investigative agency, such as the US National Transportation Safety Board, or by learning from Germany and assigning investigations to a major research institute.
Only by stopping the Ministry of Transportation and Communications from acting both as player and referee can solutions be found following traffic accidents, rather than being stuck in a rut that only cures the symptoms without finding the root cause.
Demanding that a few politicians step down from office will neither bring real closure to those affected, nor prevent similar disasters from happening again. Larry Lin is a faculty member of National Taiwan University and former visiting research fellow at Harvard University.
Translated by Chang Ho-ming
In a stark reminder of China’s persistent territorial overreach, Pema Wangjom Thongdok, a woman from Arunachal Pradesh holding an Indian passport, was detained for 18 hours at Shanghai Pudong Airport on Nov. 24 last year. Chinese immigration officials allegedly informed her that her passport was “invalid” because she was “Chinese,” refusing to recognize her Indian citizenship and claiming Arunachal Pradesh as part of South Tibet. Officials had insisted that Thongdok, an Indian-origin UK resident traveling for a conference, was not Indian despite her valid documents. India lodged a strong diplomatic protest, summoning the Chinese charge d’affaires in Delhi and demanding
With the Year of the Snake reaching its conclusion on Monday next week, now is an opportune moment to reflect on the past year — a year marked by institutional strain and national resilience. For Taiwan, the Year of the Snake was a composite of political friction, economic momentum, social unease and strategic consolidation. In the political sphere, it was defined less by legislative productivity and more by partisan confrontation. The mass recall movement sought to remove 31 Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislators following the passage of controversial bills that expanded legislative powers and imposed sweeping budget cuts. While the effort
When Hong Kong’s High Court sentenced newspaper owner Jimmy Lai (黎智英) to 20 years in prison this week, officials declared that his “heinous crimes” had long poisoned society and that his punishment represented justice restored. In their telling, Lai is the mastermind of Hong Kong’s unrest — the architect of a vast conspiracy that manipulated an otherwise contented population into defiance. They imply that removing him would lead to the return of stability. It is a politically convenient narrative — and a profoundly false one. Lai did not radicalize Hong Kong. He belonged to the same generation that fled from the Chinese
There is a story in India about a boy called Prahlad who was an ardent worshipper of Lord Narayana, whom his father considered an enemy. His son’s devotion vexed the father to the extent that he asked his sister, Holika, who could not be burned by fire, to sit with the boy in her lap and burn him to death. Prahlad knew about this evil plan, but sat in his aunt’s lap anyway. His faith won, as he remained unscathed by the fire, while his aunt was devoured by the flames. In some small way, Prahlad reminds me of Taiwan
RSS