5 suspects indicted over Taipei building project

Taipei, April 29 (CNA) Five people including the head of the construction project were indicted Monday over a case relating to the partial collapse of a residential building in Taipei's Dazhi District last year.

According to Taipei District Prosecutors Office, the suspects included Chiu Cheng-hung (邱丞鴻), Chang Po-hsiang (張博翔), Wang Te-sheng (王德生), Chiang Jo-yen (姜若彥) and Liu Feng-shou (劉豐壽).

The case stems from Sept. 7, 2023, when underground excavation work at a Kee Tai Properties construction site at Lane 94, Dazhi Street in Zhongshan District, Taipei, caused a neighboring building to sink into the ground and six others to lean to one side.

The incident resulted in hundreds of people from different households, including those in the partially-sunken building, to be evacuated and temporarily resettled.

The five men are believed to have broken a number of building construction rules, including intentionally reducing the thickness of the foundation's diaphragm wall by 10 centimeters to 50 cm, even though the building's structural drawings clearly marked 60 cm, prosecutors said.

This decision was made by Chiu, who was in charge of Kee Tai's project in Dazhi, and Chang, the construction site supervisor, during a work meeting held on Sept. 30, 2022.

Both men knew that the diaphragm walls, which are reinforced concrete structures built in the ground to support deep excavation, should have been 60 cm thick according to blueprints, but still told their subcontractors to go with 50 cm, prosecutors said.

Also based on the project's construction schedule, prosecutors said Chiu and Chang did not respect the sequence in which the foundation work should have been carried out, as they wanted to avoid further construction delays.

According to the office, the Dazhi project had already caused damage to nearby homes in April 2023.

At the time, Chiu and Chang attempted to prevent further escalation by hiring a third party firm to provide weekly monitoring reports, which they altered to make it appear as if everything was in order.

The reports included various soil and geology readings related to surface settlement, building settlement and building inclinometer, some of which exceeded the warning limit shown in a Sept. 1 report, but the two still ordered workers to proceed as usual after excavation work began on Aug. 1.

They should have paid attention to the warning limits, and taken action to prevent conditions from worsening, but instead Chiu and Chang chose to continue with the excavation in order to accelerate the construction work, prosecutors said.

Meanwhile, the office also found other discrepancies in the project.

Liu, a technician who worked for a contractor at the site, signed off on a report prepared by Chang in March 2023 regarding progress on the diaphragm wall, although he never did any actual inspecting, prosecutors said.

Also, when Taipei City government received a complaint about the incident that occurred in April, it ordered Kee Tai, the contractor, and Wang, the project's supervising architect, to send people to the site to learn more about the problem, according to prosecutors.

However, Wang never visited the site nor did he send any of his staff, though Chang still asked him to sign off on a preliminary liability report related to the damage caused in the incident, they said,

On June 21 the same year, neither Wang nor any of his people showed up to conduct an inspection, instead asking Chiang, a Kee Tai employee, to sign off on a report on his behalf.

The actions exhibited by the five suspects ultimately contributed to the incident in September 2023, prosecutors said.

During the investigation, Chiu, Chang and Wang have repeatedly denied any responsibility over the incident, the office said, adding that the three men engaged in serious offenses against public safety and should be sentenced to at least seven months in prison.

Although Chiang and Liu were found to have forged documents, both admitted to their wrongdoing, hence prosecutors asked that the court take that into consideration when ruling on the case.

Meanwhile, regarding earlier accusations made against retired Kee Tai Properties Chairman Chen Shih-ming (陳世銘) of attempted murder, prosecutors said there is no evidence to suggest Chen directed or supervised any of the work carried out at the construction site in Dazhi.