A technician at the state-run Taiwan Power Co.'s (Taipower) Nantou Shuili Taguan hydroelectric plant was given a suspended 20-month prison sentence Monday for his role in failing to prevent a flash flood that killed four campers in September 2020.
The technician, a man surnamed Su (?), was also sentenced to 20 days of penal servitude, which can be converted to a fine of NT$1,000 (US$35.97) per day, for falsifying his work diary, the court said.
However, the court suspended the prison sentence for five years, saying he had shown signs of remorse and reached a settlement with the victims' families for compensation.
The court added that the families of the victims had decided not to pursue the case, but that the ruling could still be appealed to a higher court.
Su, who was on duty in the dam's control room when the incident happened, failed to appropriately respond to a glitch that caused the Wujie dam's Gate No. 6 to open without warning in the early hours of Sept. 13 last year, the court said.
According to the court, around 193,440 cubic meters of water was discharged through the dam without advanced warning that day, which resulted in the deaths of four people from a group of six camping downstream from the dam in the Lishi Creek in Renai Township.
The opening of the gate set off a warning alarm in the control room at around 4:26 a.m. after the sudden discharge of water caused levels in the dam's reservoir to drop.
However, Su did not notice the alarm nor the sudden drop in the reservoir's water levels, according to the court.
At around 4:27 a.m., a villager surnamed Yang (?) called the control room to alert them to flash flooding downstream.
While this prompted Su to begin closing Gate No. 6., he did not fully close the gate until around 4:43 a.m.
At that time, five of six campers from two families, one surnamed Lu (?) and the other surnamed Lai (?), were sleeping in tents pitched in the creek bed around 5.5 kilometers from the dam. The mother of the Lu family was sleeping in her car.
Among the five swept away by the flash flooding, only the father of the Lai family survived after swimming to safety on the riverbank.
Lai's 7-year-old son and all of the three members of the Lu family -- a 53-year-old father, 48-year-old mother and their 12-year-old daughter -- were killed.
The court said it was negligence on the part of the Taipower technician Su that led to the tragedy.
Source: Focus Taiwan News Channel