A judicial investigation into a construction incident in Taichung that killed one person and injured 10 is under way, with Highwealth Construction Co ordered to stop all work pending a safety probe.
A train on the Taichung MRT system on Wednesday hit a crane boom that had fallen onto the tracks.
Taichung Mass Rapid Transit Corp (TMRT) interim chairman Lin Liang-tay (林良泰) yesterday released video footage of the incident and said the company would file for damage compensation of NT$200 million (US$6.5 million) from Highwealth Construction.
Photo courtesy of the Taichung Fire Bureau
The video from surveillance cameras showed that the boom from a condominum building separated from a crane and fell onto the MRT track 150m in front of Feng-le Park Station. The MRT train stopped at the station at 12:27:05pm. When the train was restarting at 12:27:22pm, several people, including an MRT attendant and the station’s security guard, who saw the twisted metal of the crane boom, shouted and signaled the train to stop. The attendant is seen on the video calling on a wireless radio for someone to use the emergency hand brake to stop the train.
However, the warnings failed and the train smashed into the crane boom at 12:27:45pm, resulting in the death of an assistant professor at Providence University in Taichung, and injuring 10 people, including a Canadian language teacher surnamed Bardsley.
TMRT transportation section chief Hsu Tai-ming (許泰銘) said a system to detect objects on tracks and to stop MRT trains is in place and should be working, but the distance between the crane boom and the station was too short, so there was not enough time to stop the train.
Taichung police yesterday took the statements of workers at the condominium building: the construction site supervisor and seven workers and equipment operators. The eight were transferred to Taichung prosecutors for further questioning.
The site supervisor, surnamed Tsai (蔡), was released on bail of NT$500,000, a crane equipment supervisor, surnamed Liu (劉), was freed on bail of NT$300,000, and a crane operator, surnamed Lu (呂), and onsite signal operator, surnamed Hsu (許), were released on bail of NT$200,000 each.
The four men are likely to face charges of offenses against public safety, along with negligence resulting in death and bodily harm. The other four workers were released without bail, while prosecutors also gathered material and took testimony from witnesses and passengers in the damaged MRT cars.
Taichung Urban Development Bureau Director Lee Cheng-wei (李正偉) ordered Highwealth to stop its nine building projects in the city as the agency conducts safety inspections.
Lee said the company has been fined NT$810,000 for contravening the Building Act (建築法), while the Ministry of Labor fined it NT$300,000 for safety breaches.
Despite the imposed shutdown, city inspectors found one building project in which Highwealth crews were still working for which it was fined an additional NT$270,000.
Reports by the Chinese-language Liberty Times (the sister paper of the Taipei Times) said that Highwealth and its subsidiaries have a poor record on workplace safety, causing 10 deaths in 10 incidents over the past five years.
Ministry of Labor officials confirmed the reports and said that inspections should be carried out for all of the work sites of the company and its subsidiaries in Taiwan.
Records showed Highwealth companies were embroiled in four major work site incidents in Taichung within the past four years, including a construction worker falling to his death in October 2020, another worker falling from a construction site the following month, a fire at a company site in 2020 and another fire in 2021. The six other fatal incidents took place in other cities in the past five years.
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