Changhua County government officials have been deemed mostly responsible for a deadly blaze at a commercial building last year, with penalties to be announced later, a Control Yuan report said on Wednesday.
Control Yuan members Yeh Ta-hua (葉大華) and Pasuya Poiconu presented the report after completing a probe into the fire at the Chiaoyu Building in Changhua City that occurred on June 30 last year, which resulted in four deaths and 22 injuries.
The people who died were three guests of an upper floor hotel and one firefighter.
Photo: Liu Hsiao-hsin, Taipei Times
The 30-year-old building had numerous internal renovations, added-on structures and other modifications, which were not inspected by government agencies for fire code and safety compliance, Yeh said, adding that the blaze was the building’s fourth in its history.
The fire burned for nearly nine hours after likely being ignited by either an electrical outlet failure or a burning cigarette on a second-floor staircase. Flames spread quickly through ventilation shafts, mostly affecting the Passion Fruit Hotel on the sixth to ninth floors.
The business was operating as a COVID-19 quarantine hotel at the time.
The fire was due to a series of mistakes and lack of government oversight, and the hotel’s management did not enact fire prevention measures or adhere to safety regulations, Poiconu said.
Government officials and fire inspectors had also failed to inspect the facility, he added.
“It is regrettable that it took a deadly blaze to expose the deficiencies, negligence and dereliction of duty,” Poiconu said.
Firefighters should receive enhanced training and follow the best practices of safety agencies in Japan, the US and the UK, he said, adding that this would include new equipment and education.
The probe consisted of on-site inspections, interviews, and reviews of data and reports.
“We found the numerous safety code contraventions and unlawful registry changes for the upper floors, which were officially for residential use,” Yeh said, adding that a commercial permit was not applied for.
The building also did not have routes for evacuation, which county government officials should have identified, Yeh said.
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
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
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