Premier Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌) yesterday issued four directives to address public safety issues that have surfaced following a fire in Kaohsiung that killed 46 people and injured dozens.
The fire at the 13-story Cheng Chung Cheng (城中城) building on Thursday was Taiwan’s second-deadliest, behind a February 1995 blaze at the Weierkang Club in Taichung that killed 64 people.
Local residents have said the Cheng Chung Cheng building was home to many poor, elderly or disabled people, and many appear to have been trapped in their apartments during the blaze.
In a meeting convened yesterday with several Cabinet members, Su put the Ministry of the Interior in charge of carrying through four tasks, Executive Yuan spokesman Lo Ping-cheng (羅秉成) said.
Su asked the ministry to work with local governments and check on fire-prevention mechanism in all old buildings, particularly residential buildings with mixed commercial use, adding that amendments ought be proposed in a timely fashion if current laws are found to be inadequate.
Su also asked the ministry to work with the Ministry of Health and Welfare as well as local authorities to prioritize resources for people from disadvantaged groups living in such buildings.
Buildings that are in a state of disrepair should be prioritized in local governments’ building renovation projects, Su said.
He also tasked the ministry with amending the Condominium Administration Act (公寓大廈管理條例) to make it mandatory for all buildings to establish a management committee.
However, the act does not apply to the 18,000 mixed-use buildings in the nation’s six special municipalities that were built before it was promulgated in 1995, it said.
Separately, the Kaohsiung City Government said it would cover the medical expenses of people injured in the fire and help arrange accommodation for the next six months for residents who have been displaced.
Additional reporting by CNA
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater