Five construction workers, including one Thai and a Ghanaian national, died in a construction accident in Linkou (林口), Taipei County, on Sunday afternoon.
A Broadcasting Corp of China report (BCC) yesterday said the Ghanaian worker and an injured comatriot had entered the country on temporary visas and may have been working illegally.
The accident took place at around 4pm at the "Farglory Future City" construction site owned by the Farglory Land Development Co.
Site workers were filling mortar and plaster as part of the first-floor's slab works and were in the middle of the grouting process when they discovered plaster was leaking from pillars in the basement.
Collapse
Several workers went down to the basement to check on the situation when the grouting work collapsed, burying five workers under a large amount of plaster.
Police identified the five dead workers as Yeh Chi-fu (葉吉復), 63, and his son Yeh Chou-lung (葉洲龍), 29, both Amis Aborigines; Lu Chien-hsin (呂建興), 40; Thai national Serngtrin Sae Chou, 30, and Boadan Francis, a Ghanaian. The injured worker was identified as Beng Yaw from Ghana.
Yaw, who was not trapped, was rushed to Linkou's Chang Gung Memorial Hospital in the early evening.
The rescue operation lasted until yesterday morning, but the other five men showed no signs of life when dug out by firefighters and police officers.
Yeh Chi-fu's wife began to cry as she saw her husband and son's bodies carried from the construction site.
She said they were both construction workers and they traveled to wherever construction projects needed workers.
Work stopped
The Taipei County Government immediately ordered Farglory Land Development Co to stop construction work pending safety checks and for the project's architects and contractors to work with labor inspection officials from the Council of Labor Affairs to determine the cause of the accident.
Compensation
Farglory Land Development Co held a press conference yesterday to say that it had paid NT$500,000 per person in compensation to families of the deceased, while Yaw had been offered NT$200,000.
The company also apologized for the incident.
Taipei County Commissioner Chou Hsi-wei (周錫瑋), who visited the site later with construction experts, said that violations of construction regulations during the grouting process had caused the collapse.
Chou said all construction sites in the Taipei County would be inspected soon.
The Council of Labor Affairs said that Farglory would be fined if it was found to have hired the foreign workers illegally.
In related news, two workers were killed on Sunday in an explosion at a plant in Taoyuan County producing polysilicon wafers for use in solar panels.
The blast occured at around 2pm at Green Energy Technology Co.
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