Workers at state-run Taiwan Tobacco and Liquor Corp’s (TTL) Hualien Distillery have begun to clean up nearly 200,000 bottles of alcohol that were destroyed during last week’s massive quake.
The Hualien facility mainly produces rice wine, along with smaller quantities of craft-style beer and a series of liquors containing real gold flakes, distillery head Wang Cheng-li (王正利) said yesterday.
During the quake, which measured 7.2 on the Richter scale and magnitude 7.4 on the moment magnitude scale on Wednesday last week, more than 16,000 12-bottle packs of various types of alcohol — or 192,000 bottles — were shattered, causing financial losses of at least NT$14 million (US$436,205), Wang said.
Photo: CNA
“And that’s only a rough estimate, because a lot of the alcohol is stacked together [in storage], and we haven’t been able to take a detailed inventory,” he added.
The clean-up had only started in the last day or two, due to initial concerns about the higher-proof spirits sparking an explosion, he said.
Compared with Wednesday’s quake, Wang said a magnitude 6.4 quake that struck Hualien on Feb. 6, 2018, seemed to shake even more violently.
Still, it would take “at least a week” before the distillery is cleaned up and able to resume production, he said.
While the distillery’s production lines were damaged in the earthquake, the worst-hit part of the facility was its storage warehouse, which remains littered with broken glass bottles, cracked aging vats, and pools of various types of alcohol.
“That’s 30-year-old Shaoxing wine with the darker color,” Wang said, pointing to stream-like stains running along one of the building’s outer walls.
After the 2018 earthquake, the distillery installed protective measures, such as netting in its storage areas, he said.
While those changes failed to prevent extensive losses last week, the situation would likely have been even worse without them, deputy distillery head Chien Kai-wei (簡凱偉) said.
“Six years ago, we lost more than 10,000 vats of Shaoxing wine, and we reduced that to about 1,000 vats this time,” he said.
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