Two workers were rescued from a vehicle that fell into a river at a construction site near Minquan Bridge (民權大橋) in Taipei yesterday afternoon, leaving one without vital signs, authorities said.
The incident occurred at about 1pm near the No. 6 watergate on the Keelung River (基隆河) by Yingfeng Riverside Park (迎風河濱公園), when the vehicle returned to the site after a lunch break and was parking.
The victims, a 50-year-old woman and her 59-year-old husband, both Taiwanese and assisting a painting contractor, were driving a personal small vehicle when it went into the river for reasons that remain under investigation, said the city’s Public Works Department, which is managing the reconstruction project.
Photo: Cheng Ching-yi, Taipei Times
Firefighters and other construction personnel launched a rescue operation using a lifeboat at the site.
The woman was conscious when rescued, while the man was in out-of-hospital cardiac arrest and was rushed to a hospital, where medical staff continued resuscitation efforts.
The Taipei Department of Labor said it has dispatched personnel to the site to conduct a labor inspection and assess safety compliance, adding that the exact cause of the accident remains under investigation.
Preliminary findings indicate that although the incident occurred outside active work hours, it took place within the construction zone, and authorities are to assess environmental hazards and ensure site safety while clarifying responsibility, the labor department said.
The construction project aims to address structural aging and surface settlement on the old bridge.
Work resumed yesterday, the second day after the Lunar New Year holiday, and is scheduled to be completed later this year, the Public Works Department said.
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
RSS