Taiwan issue arrest warrant for currently-missing developer of collapsed building
On Tuesday, Taiwan issued an arrest warrant for the building’s developer, Lin Ming-hui, along with two others,
Reuters reported.
The previous day, Tainan Mayor William Lai said that survivors have reported “legal violations” in the building, according to the
BBC. Tainan’s government said the building wasn’t listed as dangerous before the quake, though prosecutors are now investigating the complex’s construction to see if the builder cut corners.
But plenty of people in Tainan say they had misgivings about the Weiguan Jinlong long before it fell. A man whose grandchildren were still buried inside the complex on Sunday told the
Associated Press that he had warned his son not to purchase an apartment there.
“It was suspiciously cheap,” said the man, identified only by his surname, Huang. A man standing next to him nodded his head in agreement. He, too, was waiting on news of relatives trapped inside.
Huang’s son escaped the collapse, but his daughter-in-law was in the hospital in serious condition, according to the
AP. His 11- and 12-year-old grandsons, who had been sleeping on the ninth floor, have yet to be found.
Yueh Chin-sen, whose mother-in-law’s family of eight was trapped inside the building Monday, said that he knew residents had complained in the past about problems with their home.
“There were cracks in the walls and tiles fell off after several quakes in recent years,” he told
Agence France-Presse.
Others brought up how the basements always seemed to leak when it rained, or how the elevators were rarely working, or how the pipes were often blocked.
“We always wanted to move, but we couldn’t afford it,” Chun-jung told
Reuters.
On Sunday, Taiwan’s state-run news agency, CNA, reported that several cooking oil cans were found in pillars of the destroyed building. Tai Yun-fa, a structural engineer, told CNA that in the 1990s it was legal to use oil cans as “filler” in pillars that served aesthetic rather than weight-bearing purposes. In some cases, this may actually be safer than filling the pillars with concrete: It prevents the building from being too heavy. But the practice was banned after cans were found in the walls of buildings that collapsed during a 1999 earthquake that killed more than 2,300 people.
Still, though no longer legal — foam is now used instead — the cans wouldn’t have been what made the building hazardous, Tai said.
But the cans may not have been the building’s only problem. Taiwanese media has reported that polystyrene — the plastic used for “packing peanuts” — has been found mixed in with the concrete of supporting beams, Reuters reported.
And Lee Kunhuan, an architect and a former mayor of the area, told the New York Times that although the Weiguan Jinlong complex complied with building codes during construction in the early 1990s, that was only because developers exploited loopholes that have since been closed — much like the tin can law.
Today, he said, the building would not have been allowed to reach higher than four stories, and it would have been better designed to accommodate the stress of an earthquake.
Taiwan, located in the Pacific’s “Ring of Fire,” is used to seismic activity, though temblors aren’t often as destructive as this most recent one.
Neighbors who watched the building go up — in fits and starts over the course of three years as the construction companies involved ran out of money — said they doubted the workmanship.
“When it was being built, I looked at it and thought, only people from out of town would buy it. We local people would never dare to,” Yang Shu-mei, who lived next to the building, told
Reuters.
And once the condos went on the market,
Reuters reported, a local bank would not issue mortgages to those who bought them. Tainan resident Kuo Yi-chien told the
news service the bank did not want to grant loans to people living in what they felt was a shoddily made building.
Kuo’s daughter, who bought an apartment in the complex after securing a loan from a different bank, is now in an intensive care unit with a cracked skull. Her husband is at another hospital ICU with damaged lungs.
Their seven-year-old daughter died in the collapse.
“People from outside of the town, people like them, had no idea what was going on before they moved in,” Kuo explained to
Reuters as she waited outside her daughter’s hospital room. Kuo said she hadn’t heard about the problems with the building, or the bank’s qualms with it, until after her family moved in.
“They did not know the building was completed by the second developer after the first one went bust. They only found out after they signed the contract,” she said.
Four days after the quake, the developer, Lin Ming-hui, was nowhere to be found.
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