Two alerts for an earthquake with a perceived magnitude of 1 were erroneously sent on Monday due to technological limitations with detecting distant seismological activity, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) Seismological Center said on Tuesday.
At 9:21pm on Monday, a magnitude 6.8 earthquake struck about 437km east of Keelung between Japan’s Miyakojima and Kumejima islands at a depth of 36.6km.
The greatest intensity felt in Taiwan was magnitude 1 along the east coast and central counties.
Photo courtesy of the Central Weather Administration
However, residents of New Taipei City, Keelung and Yilan County at 9:22pm received two SMS alerts, one from the CWA and one using the agency’s old name, the Central Weather Bureau.
The discrepancy was due to technical limitations with sensing earthquakes further than 100km away, center technical officer Chiu Chun-ta (邱俊達) told a news conference on Tuesday.
The system automatically determines whether to issue an alert based on initial data, thereby sacrificing precise accuracy, he said.
On Monday, the system detected the position and intensity to be within its monitoring network, and with the additional consideration of its shallow depth, determined it met the criteria for issuing an alert, Chiu said, adding that it was the first time an alert was issued for such a distant earthquake.
As for the repeated message, Chiu said there are still some minor issues as the agency transitions into the CWA.
However, he added that the messages were not a mistake, as there was an earthquake that occurred.
The CWA hopes to cooperate with its neighbors to receive seismic data from additional stations to improve the accuracy of its reporting of distant earthquakes, he said.
A tsunami risk is unlikely, as it usually takes a quake of at least magnitude 7 and within a depth of 35km to cause the ripples on the seabed that lead to tsunamis, he added.
Additional reporting by CNA
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