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進入《TAIPEI TIMES 焦點》 Government bickers on pipeline plan
RESPONSIBILITY DILEMNA: Woody Duh said that the responsibility for the nation’s pipelines was shared by different agencies, depending on where they were located
By Loa Iok-sin / Staff reporter
The public is calling for the government to impose stricter regulations on underground pipelines and make maps of where they are located public following the blasts that devastated Greater Kaohsiung last week. However, local and the central governments cannot agree on which agency should play the principal role and have the final say.
“All the applications to lay pipelines underground have to be approved by local government, thus the Greater Kaohsiung Government must have all the information about underground pipelines, and it is within its power to decide whether to publish such information,” Deputy Minister of Economic Affairs Woody Duh （杜紫軍） told a news conference in Taipei yesterday. “Whatever the local government decides to do, the Ministry of Economic Affairs [MOEA] would respect the decision, and give it a hand whenever needed.”
“But I must warn that when detailed information about underground pipelines is released, people intending sabotage could take advantage of it,” he added.
However, in a press release the city government denied that it has all the information available and urged the ministry to release information about pipelines used by government-run businesses, industrial parks and zones and science parks run by the ministry or other central government agencies.
Asked for comment in a separate press conference in the afternoon, Duh said that not all underground pipelines would fall under the jurisdiction of a single government agency.
“If the pipelines belong to an industrial park or manufacturing zone approved by the MOEA, the ministry should be responsible for them,” Duh said. “But if they belong to a science park approved by the Ministry of Science and Technology, the science ministry would be responsible for them; and if the pipelines are under a freeway, then it would fall under jurisdiction of the National Freeway Bureau, and so on.”
“However, I would like to stress that the pipeline that went wrong this time was approved by the Greater Kaohsiung Government,” he added.
Nevertheless, Duh said both the central and local governments would review the nation’s network of thousands of kilometers of underground pipelines following the explosions.
“The central government is set to help local branches build a thorough data bank to serve as a base for safety checks in the future,” Duh said.
An initial meeting with petrochemical companies is scheduled today, he added.
While government officials could not provide an estimate of the full extent of pipeline networks laid nationwide, state-run oil refiner CPC Corp, Taiwan （CPC, 台灣中油） alone has 3,480km of lines transporting oil products, 2,900km for natural gas and 700km for petrochemicals, CPC spokesman Chang Ray-chung （張瑞宗） said by telephone yesterday.
Duh said that there is not a set of standard operation procedure （SOP） in place to deal with the kind of accident that occured in Greater Kaohsiung, adding that different government agencies at different levels should get together to discuss pipeline management in the future, as well as creating an SOP for similar cases.
Factory operations at Asia Polymer Corp （亞聚）, USI Corp （台聚）, and China General Plastics Corp （華夏） remain normal as only the underground piping systems in areas affected by the explosions were halted, the companies said in filings to the Taiwan Stock Exchange.
China Petrochemical Development Corp （中石化） plans to increase the overground transport of materials and is to cut production for a week. Revenue will be reduced by NT$36 million （US$1.2 million）, the company said in a statement to the exchange.
LCY Chemical Corp （李長榮）, which the city government alleges is culpable for the explosions, is expected to reduce production for the next two weeks, cutting sales by NT$230 million, the company said on Saturday.（Additional reporting by Bloomberg）
新聞來源：TAIPEI TIMES
