A contractor is mainly at fault for the collapse of a ceiling at Taoyuan’s Bade Civil Sports Center during an earthquake on Sunday, Taoyuan Mayor Cheng Wen-tsan (鄭文燦) said yesterday.
The steel-frame ceiling fell on the badminton courts below, injuring one person, during the magnitude 6.8 earthquake.
In Taoyuan, the quake created an intensity of only 3 on Taiwan’s 7-tier scale and should not have caused such damage, Cheng told a city council meeting.
Photo: Chen En-hui, Taipei Times
Representatives from civil and structural engineering, and architectural associations inspected the site with city officials, and issued a report on their findings on Monday, he said.
The report concluded that the contractor, Reiju Construction, was mainly responsible for the collapse because it had designed and constructed a ceiling with “insufficient durability,” Cheng said.
A secondary cause was the recent installation of light fixtures by the China Youth Corps, the report said.
The sports center, which opened last year, is still under warranty, and the contractor said it would repair the ceiling and pay compensation, Cheng added.
He said he would publish the findings of an inspection into the collapse and look into whether officials at the city’s Office of Public Construction were in any way at fault.
Reiju Construction was also contracted this year to build community sports centers in Chiayi County and New Taipei City, as well as public housing developments in New Taipei City and Taichung, Cheng said.
Videos showing about two dozen people playing badminton on the courts just before the ceiling collapsed have circulated widely on social media.
They have reignited criticism of poor supervision of public projects, following the closure this summer of the new Hsinchu Baseball Stadium due to building flaws.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Taoyuan mayoral candidate Simon Chang (張善政) said that if elected, he would order a safety review of all construction projects approved by the city government — which is currently controlled by the Democratic Progressive Party — over the past several years.
PACIFIC OCEAN: Defense experts have warned that the ‘Shandong,’ China’s second largest aircraft carrier, poses a serious threat to eastern Taiwan’s defenses The drills conducted by the Chinese aircraft carrier Shandong in the Western Pacific last week were more aimed at showcasing China’s military capabilities to the US rather than toward Taiwan, a Taiwanese defense expert said yesterday. Lin Yin-yu (林穎佑), an assistant professor at Tamkang University’s Graduate Institute of International Affairs and Strategic Studies, said the drills which involved dozens of warplanes sought to test China’s anti-access and area denial capabilities should the US and its allies attempt to interfere in a cross-strait conflict. Lin said that the latest Chinese drills coincided with a joint maritime exercise conducted by the US, South Korea
Thousands of bottles of Sriracha have been returned or destroyed after the discovery of excessive sulfur dioxide, a bleaching agent, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced on Tuesday. About 12,600 bottles totaling 9,991.8kg of the hot sauce imported from the US by Emporium Corp (河洛企業) were flagged at the border for containing illegal levels of sulfur dioxide, the FDA said in its regular border inspection announcement. Inspectors discovered 0.5g per kilogram of the common bleaching agent and preservative, higher than the 0.03g permitted, it said. As it is the first time within six months the product has been flagged, Sriracha products from
Two people were killed and another nine injured yesterday after being stung by hornets while hiking in New Taipei City’s Rueifang District (瑞芳), with officials warning against wearing perfume or straying from trails during the autumn to avoid the potentially deadly creatures. Seven of the hikers only sustained minor injuries after being stung along the Bafenliao Hiking Trail (八分寮) and made their way down the mountain with a guide, the New Taipei City Fire Department said. Four of them — all male — sustained more serious injuries and were assisted when leaving the mountain, the department said. Two of them, a man surnamed
CHANGES: While NCCU opened the nation’s first co-ed dorm in Mucha, a recent survey showed that Taiwanese are in favor of abolishing gender segregation at high schools National Chengchi University (NCCU) has opened a co-ed dormitory, a first in Taiwan among state-funded Taiwan universities. The 22 duplexes are at the renovated “Huanan New Village,” in Taipei City’s Mucha (木柵) area, near the NCCU campus, a school official said yesterday. Twenty-two out of 37 group applications were selected in a lottery draw to select who would be chosen to live in the units, which can either be shared by up to eight students if the unit has four bedrooms, or up to 10 students if it is a five-bedroom unit, officials said. Completed in 1964 for campus staff housing,
RSS