Representatives of the Greater Taichung Administration Monitoring Alliance yesterday accused the local government of trying to conceal the truth about groundwater pollution near the shuttered Shuinan Airport (水湳機場) in Greater Taichung.
“Delinquent mayor should be severely punished by the Control Yuan,” alliance members chanted during the protest in front of the Control Yuan.
The group said that tests of the soil at the airport, which was shut down in 2004, showed that it was contaminated with heavy metals and electrical insulating oil. The protesters accused the local government of trying to hide the truth from people living near the area because of its plans to turn the old airport into the site of its Taichung Gateway Park City project — which will include a dome, an exhibition and convention center, and a college town.
Photo: CNA
Alliance member Gan Chen-yi (甘宸宜) said the state of pollution at the airport was contained in a report by the local environmental protection agency last year, which said the contaminated area spanned 7,648m2 and was about 5m in depth.
She said the group suspected the Greater Taichung Government knew about the pollution even earlier, as the report by the local agency was a re-inspection of the site and cited data from another report on the state of contamination done by the Environmental Protection Administration in 2009.
The alliance accused the municipal government of hiding the conditions at the airport from Greater Taichung Council so councilors would approve the Taichung Gateway Park City’s development budget for last year and this year.
When councilors questioned Greater Taichung Mayor Jason Hu (胡志強) about the case this month, Gan said Hu replied that he only found out about the pollution two or three weeks before.
The alliance added that the groundwater at the Han Xiang Aerospace Industrial Development Corp’s factory, located right next to Shuinan Airport’s runway, was verified to be contaminated by trichloroethylene — a toxic chemical compound.
“We suspect that all the groundwater in the nearby area could be contaminated, despite the [environmental protection] agency’s statement that only the water at the factory site and the soil at the airport are contaminated,” Taiwan Academy of Ecology secretary-general Tsai Chih-hao (蔡智豪) said.
According to the agency’s report for the city council in June, the trichloroethylene level in the groundwater at Situn Elementary School located near the airport reached 0.029mg/L — higher than the standards set for drinking water at 0.005mg/L. The agency notified the elementary school not to drink the water and to guard against exposure to the groundwater.
The protesters called on the municipal government “to honestly tell the public how long they have known about the pollution and how much the nearby residents have been affected by the polluted water.”
“If harm has been done to the residents, then the government should apologize and resolve the problem,” Tsai said.
Considering that most countries issue more than five denominations of banknotes, the central bank has decided to redesign all five denominations, the bank said as it prepares for the first major overhaul of the banknotes in more than 24 years. Central bank Governor Yang Chin-lung (楊金龍) is expected to report to the Legislative Yuan today on the bank’s operations and the redesign’s progress. The bank in a report sent to the legislature ahead of today’s meeting said it had commissioned a survey on the public’s preferences. Survey results showed that NT$100 and NT$1,000 banknotes are the most commonly used, while NT$200 and NT$2,000
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) yesterday reported the first case of a new COVID-19 subvariant — BA.3.2 — in a 10-year-old Singaporean girl who had a fever upon arrival in Taiwan and tested positive for the disease. The girl left Taiwan on March 20 and the case did not have a direct impact on the local community, it said. The WHO added the BA.3.2 strain to its list of Variants Under Monitoring in December last year, but this was the first imported case of the COVID-19 variant in Taiwan, CDC Deputy Director-General Lin Ming-cheng (林明誠) said. The girl arrived in Taiwan on
South Korea is planning to revise its controversial electronic arrival card, a step Taiwanese officials said prompted them to hold off on planned retaliatory measures, a South Korean media report said yesterday. A Yonhap News Agency report said that the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs is planning to remove the “previous departure place” and “next destination” fields from its e-arrival card system. The plan, reached after interagency consultations, is under review and aims to simplify entry procedures and align the electronic form with the paper version, a South Korean ministry official said. The fields — which appeared only on the electronic form
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) is suspending retaliation measures against South Korea that were set to take effect tomorrow, after Seoul said it is updating its e-arrival system, MOFA said today. The measures were to be a new round of retaliation after Taiwan on March 1 changed South Korea's designation on government-issued alien resident certificates held by South Korean nationals to "South Korea” from the "Republic of Korea," the country’s official name. The move came after months of protests to Seoul over its listing of Taiwan as "China (Taiwan)" in dropdown menus on its new online immigration entry system. MOFA last week
RSS