Households in areas where flooding exceeded 50cm due to Typhoon Gaemi are to receive NT$20,000 each in planned relief funding, President William Lai (賴清德) said yesterday.
Lai announced the subsidies after being briefed about the storm situation during an inspection of severely affected areas in Kaohsiung’s Meinong District (美濃).
In areas where there was flooding, but under 50cm, low-to-middle-income households would receive NT$10,000, Lai added.
Photo: Lee Hui-chou, Taipei Times
The money would be drawn from the central government’s budget, Lai said.
He urged the legislature to swiftly approve the funds once it begins a new session in September.
In the meantime, the Ministry of Finance is mulling tax relief for individuals and businesses in areas severely affected by the typhoon, which brought heavy rainfall to central and southern Taiwan before being downgraded to a tropical storm.
Photo: CNA
Duonalindao (多納林道) in Kaohsiung’s Maolin District (茂林) had 1,835mm of accumulated rainfall from Wednesday to noon yesterday, while Chiayi County’s Fencihu Township (奮起湖) had 1,677.5mm, Central Weather Administration (CWA) data showed.
Lai commended the Kaohsiung City Government’s efforts to enhance the city’s flood control system. While accumulated rainfall in the city was comparable to that brought by Typhoon Morakot in 2009, the flooding was less severe, he said.
Morakot caused catastrophic damage in Taiwan, killing at least 681 people, with 18 still missing, a Cabinet report said.
Lai said that additional cash would be provided to compensate for agricultural losses from Gaemi.
He promised to boost financial support for local governments to improve river infrastructure, including water detention facilities, to enhance the nation’s resilience to climate shocks.
The CWA yesterday morning lifted sea and land warnings for Gaemi, but added that heavy rain was likely to persist in many parts of Taiwan.
As of 8am yesterday, the eye of the storm was over China, roughly 200km west of Taiwan’s Lienchiang County, the CWA said.
It was moving at 9kph, down from 17kph, it said.
It had weakened and posed no further threat to Taiwan’s northern waters, or Kinmen and Lienchiang counties, it said.
The agency issued extremely heavy or heavy rain advisories for 15 administrative regions, including Taichung, Tainan and Kaohsiung, as well as Miaoli and Pingtung counties, and mountainous areas in Nantou County.
The CWA defines extremely heavy rain as accumulated rainfall of more than 200mm in a day or more than 100mm in three hours. Heavy rain means accumulated rainfall of at least 80mm within a 24-hour period.
Meanwhile, a tropical cloud system has developed east of the Philippines and is expected to move northwest toward Taiwan.
The system is forecast to become a tropical depression and approach Taiwan’s waters on Monday or Tuesday, the CWA said,
It is too early to tell if the system would become a tropical storm, it said, adding that even if it does not, it could still bring rain to the nation.
Additional reporting by Huang Chia-ling
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