A section of road between Keelung’s Beining Road and Chaojing Park (潮境公園) affected by a landslide on Monday is expected to reopen by Tuesday next week, the Ministry of Transportation and Communications said yesterday.
Workers aim to clear rocks and other debris by the early hours of Tuesday and complete safety checks on the slope adjacent to the road by noon the same day, the Highway Bureau said.
The bureau said that it had installed nets to protect against falling rocks and barriers along high-risk sections of the road, and would bring in consultants to reassess the situation in the next few days.
Photo: Lu Hsien-hsiu, Taipei Times
An alternate route is available at the 73K+380 marker of Provincial Highway No. 2. It travels along Provincial Highway No. 2D and Fongjia Road (Route 102), Tiaohe Street (North 123), before reconnecting with Highway No. 2 at the 69K+500 marker.
The landslide occurred at about 2:30pm on Monday, with seven cars, two trucks and one motorcycle affected, while two people were injured, authorities have said.
The rocks fell from a height of 40m, with the landslide covering 4,400m2 and producing about 12,000m3 of rubble, Highway Bureau Director-General Chen Wen-juei (陳文瑞) said on Monday night.
There were about 50 large boulders at the scene, and the biggest, which needed to be broken down before being cleared, weighed up to 100 tonnes, Chen said.
The bureau yesterday said in a statement that it had dispatched eight crushers, four dump trucks, one water truck and several engineers to the site for clearance operations.
One of the two people who were injured is a 46-year-old man surnamed Wang (王), who had been trapped in a truck. He had a head injury and a hematoma on his abdomen.
Wu Chun-yi (吳俊毅), a physician at Chang Gung Memorial Hospital’s Keelung branch, yesterday said that Wang was in a stable condition following surgery, but would be kept in intensive care for observation.
A 40-year-old man surnamed Chen (陳) had fractured ribs and shoulder blades, Wu said.
Keelung Mayor George Hsieh (謝國樑) on Monday said that he would ask the city’s legal staff to look into providing maximum compensation to those affected by the landslide as soon as possible.
Minister of Transportation and Communications Lee Men-yen (李孟諺) yesterday said that the combined effects of recent earthquakes and continuous heavy rain might have caused the landslide.
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