The Executive Yuan on Tuesday initiated a NT$1 billion (US$33.69 million) program to boost natural disaster resilience in response to extreme weather events and earthquakes, Cabinet spokesman Lo Ping-cheng (羅秉成) said.
Premier Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌) approved the program’s launch, Lo said in statement following a Cabinet meeting on disaster management.
Taiwan is in an earthquake hot spot and reports an average of 40,000 quakes a year, making the promotion of earthquake awareness among the public an important duty for the government, Su was quoted as saying.
Photo: CNA
A previous disaster prevention and response improvement plan would be continued in the new program, which aims to build weather event and earthquake resilience via interagency and government-civil society collaboration, Su said.
The Ministry of the Interior is to include the quality of work in disaster prevention as part of its performance evaluation for government offices, he said.
Climate change has increased the frequency of extreme weather events, such as flooding in South Africa in April, hailstorms in Germany and France this month, and ongoing wildfires in California, he added.
A hailstorm and gales that measured 9 on the Beaufort scale in Taipei on Friday last week are linked to the rise in extreme weather events around the world due to climate change, Su said.
Taiwan’s flood alert zones must be adjusted in anticipation of suddenly occurring and high-volume rainfall, while disaster surveillance and warning systems must be enhanced, he said.
The Cabinet has since 2019 allocated NT$6 billion to projects dealing with weather-related disasters, including efforts to create a weather data infrastructure and artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted flood prevention system, Su said.
The Taiwan Railways Administration is to install mudslide detection and warning systems on slopes as Taiwan High Speed Rail Corp has done, with help from the Public Construction Commission if necessary, he said.
An alert message system for torrential rain is being tested in high-risk areas such as Taipei’s Shuangxi District (雙溪), and New Taipei City’s Hubaotan (虎豹潭) and Dabao River (大豹溪), he added.
Su applauded the creation in February of an integrated platform to coordinate search-and-rescue-related services, including the National Airborne Service Corps, the Civil Aeronautics Administration, the coast guard and the armed forces, he said.
The ministry is mulling a plan to create an AI-assisted search-and-rescue dispatch system, Su said, urging agencies in charge of related efforts to make use of advances in technology.
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) mention of Taiwan’s official name during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Wednesday was likely a deliberate political play, academics said. “As I see it, it was intentional,” National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies professor Wang Hsin-hsien (王信賢) said of Ma’s initial use of the “Republic of China” (ROC) to refer to the wider concept of “the Chinese nation.” Ma quickly corrected himself, and his office later described his use of the two similar-sounding yet politically distinct terms as “purely a gaffe.” Given Ma was reading from a script, the supposed slipup
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
The bodies of two individuals were recovered and three additional bodies were discovered on the Shakadang Trail (砂卡礑) in Taroko National Park, eight days after the devastating earthquake in Hualien County, search-and-rescue personnel said. The rescuers reported that they retrieved the bodies of a man and a girl, suspected to be the father and daughter from the Yu (游) family, 500m from the entrance of the trail on Wednesday. The rescue team added that despite the discovery of the two bodies on Friday last week, they had been unable to retrieve them until Wednesday due to the heavy equipment needed to lift