A technician at Taiwan Power Co’s (Taipower) Daguan Power Plant (大觀電廠) in Nantou County’s Shueili Township (水里) was on Monday given a suspended 20-month prison sentence for his role in failing to prevent a flash flood that killed four campers in September last year.
The technician, a man surnamed Su (蘇), was also sentenced to 20 days of penal servitude, which can be converted to a fine of NT$1,000 per day, for falsifying his work diary, the court said.
However, the court suspended the prison sentence for five years, saying he had shown signs of remorse and reached a settlement to compensate the victims’ families.
Photo courtesy of a member of the public
The ruling can be appealed.
Su, who was on duty in Wujie Dam’s control room when the incident happened, failed to appropriately respond to a glitch that caused the dam’s Gate No. 6 to open in the early hours of Sept. 13 last year, the court said.
About 193,440m3 of water was discharged from the dam without warning, resulting in the deaths of four people, who had been part of a group of six who were camping downstream from the dam near Lisi Creek (栗栖溪) in Nantou County’s Renai Township (仁愛), it said.
The opening of the gate set off an alarm in the control room at about 4:26am after the discharge of water, the court said.
However, Su did not notice the alarm nor the sudden drop in the reservoir’s water levels, it said.
At about 4:27am, a local resident, surnamed Yang (楊), alerted the control room to flash flooding downstream, the court said, adding that while this prompted Su to begin closing Gate No. 6, he did not fully close it until about 4:43am.
At that time, five of the six campers from two families, one surnamed Lu (盧) and the other surnamed Lai (賴), were sleeping in tents in the creek bed about 5.5km from the dam. The mother of the Lu family was sleeping in her car.
Of the five swept away, only the father of the Lai family survived after swimming to safety.
The Lai’s seven-year-old son and all of the three members of the Lu family — a 53-year-old man, 48-year-old woman and their 12-year-old daughter — were killed.
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