A strong magnitude 7 earthquake rattled the nation and injured two people at 12:08pm yesterday.
The Central Weather Bureau said that the quake's epicenter was located in the Pacific 109km east of Ilan County and 58.8km underground. The magnitude was 5 in Ilan, 4 in Taipei City, Taoyuan, Taichung, Taitung and Yunlin, 3 in Hsinchu and Nantou and 1 in Kaohsiung City.
PHOTO: SEAN CHAO, TAIPEI TIMES
"It started to shake up and down then later became parallel. The entire duration was about 30 seconds," said Kuo Kai-wen (郭鎧紋), director of the bureau's Earthquake Center.
Kuo said that the quake's power was equivalent to about 16 atomic bombs yesterday. By comparison, the 921 earthquake in 1999 was 7.3 in magnitude and similar to the power of 46 atomic bombs.
"Strong earthquakes like this might happen again in the next four weeks or so," Kuo said. "We should keep our heads up for those potential quakes."
In Ilan, a piece of the ceiling at the Ilan Farmers' Association fell and injured Chiayi farmer Lo Shun-yi (
In Taoyuan, an aluminum water tank on the roof of a restaurant was sheared off by the quake and the tank hit Lien Shu-mei (
Local police in Keelung said two seven-story buildings in the city slightly "kissed" each other during the quake and broken tiles fell to the ground. The accident scared pedestrians but injured no one.
In Kaohsiung County, firefighters had to put out a fire, allegedly caused by the quake, at an Internet cafe in Fengshan City. When the earthquake occurred, employees immediately evacuated its customers but gas pipelines broke loose during the quake and caused the fire. The fire did not injure anybody, but destroyed a few computers.
In Taipei City, Taipei 101, the tallest building in the world, did not suffer any damage, but 20 workers were briefly stuck inside an elevator when elevators were shut off when the earthquake began. Technicians turned the elevators back on a few minutes later.
Taipei 101 Construction Department Assistant Manager Yeh Yen-shun (
Yesterday's earthquake also forced Taipei City's MRT system to stop trains, evacuate all passengers and halt services for more than an hour. But the subway system went back into service at 1:20pm after all security checks were completed.
Also see story:
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday inaugurated the Danjiang Bridge across the Tamsui River in New Taipei City, saying that the structure would be an architectural icon and traffic artery for Taiwan. Feted as a major engineering achievement, the Danjiang Bridge is 920m long, 211m tall at the top of its pylon, and is the longest single-pylon asymmetric cable-stayed bridge in the world, the government’s Web site for the structure said. It was designed by late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. The structure, with a maximum deck of 70m, accommodates road and light rail traffic, and affords a 200m navigation channel for boats,
PRECISION STRIKES: The most significant reason to deploy HIMARS to outlying islands is to establish a ‘dead zone’ that the PLA would not dare enter, a source said A High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) would be deployed to Penghu County and Dongyin Island (東引) in Lienchiang County (Matsu) to force the Chinese military to retreat at least 100km from the coastline, a military source said yesterday. Taiwan has been procuring HIMARS and Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) from the US in batches. Once all batches have been delivered, Taiwan would possess 111 HIMARS units and 504 ATACMS, which have a range of 300km. Considering that “offense is the best defense,” the military plans to forward-deploy the systems to outlying islands such as Penghu and Dongyin so that
WHAT WAS ALL THAT FOR? Jaw Shaw-kong said that Cheng Li-wen had pushed for more drastic cuts and attacked him, just for the outcome to be nearly identical to his bill The legislature yesterday passed a supplementary budget bill to fund the purchase of separate packages of US military equipment, with the combined amount of spending capped at NT$780 billion (US$24.8 billion). The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) used their legislative majority to pass the bill, which runs until 2033 and has two main funding provisions. One was for NT$300 billion of arms sales already approved by the US for Taiwan on Dec. 17 last year, the other was for NT$480 billion for another arms package expected to be announced by Washington. The bill, which fell short of the NT$1.25
‘CLEAR MESSAGE’: The bill would set up an interagency ‘tiger team’ to review sanctions tools and other economic options to help deter any Chinese aggression toward Taiwan US Representative Young Kim has introduced a bill to deter Chinese aggression against Taiwan, calling for an interagency “tiger team” to preplan coordinated sanctions and economic measures in response to possible Chinese military or political action against Taiwan. “[Chinese President] Xi Jinping [習近平] has directed the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. China has a plan. America should have one too,” Kim said in a news release on Thursday last week. She introduced the “Deter PRC [People’s Republic of China] aggression against Taiwan act” to “ensure the US has a coordinated sanctions strategy ready should
RSS