Violent and raucous over power and water

When Typhoon Soudelor hit Taiwan this Saturday, the electricity and water supply in some parts of Taiwan were affected. In Yun Ling County and Chia Yi County, fights were started due to power shortages--two electricians were attacked as a result.

The water supply had to be cut back in the Greater Taipei area; therefore, this generated a chaotic and violent scene at the supermarket as the general public fought to secure their emergency water supply. The water reservoir in the northen part of Taiwan did not stop supplying water to the Greater Taipei area, but the water coming out of the faucet was extremely yellow and murky, making it very unappealing and unhealthy to drink and use.

In the southern part of Taiwan, Yun Lin County, had a great power outage during and after the typhoon. And even though the electrician have been working very hard to retore the power, there are still 20,000 and some houses without electricity. Some houses have even been without electricity for over forty hours. Some get so frustrated with the aftermath that they take it to beating the electricians and smashing their vans with a baseball bat.

The two technicians said that it was the first time they had been beaten up and having this happened to them made them "feel disappointed with the world." The two had been out since eight a.m. trying to get everything fixed as fast as possible, and they even skipped lunch.

The assault happened at two p.m. yesterday when the technicians where attending to a utility pole that had been crushed under a tree outside an elementary school. Chen Guo Liang was approached by three drunk men; two men immediately began swinging at him after asking him why he had not fixed the electricity yet.

The other technician, Chang Yung Shin, was in the van when three men approached. And when he saw that Chen was attacked, he quickly stepped out of the van to intervene. He quickly pulled Chen away from the men and explained that they were repairing the damages as fast as they could and drove away.

But at the next site, the drunk men came back with more back-up. This time, the work van was surrounded by three sedans and six or seven men came out with two baseball bats. Chen sensed something was wrong so he locked the doors, but the perpetrators still smashed the windows of the work van. One of the men had the intention of dragging Chang out of the van, shouting at him, "Are you guys fixing the electricity or not?!" It was only after Chang had insisted that they were ready to generate power again that the guys decided to go away.

The Xiluo police precinct Deputy Chief, Huang Ren Nan, stated that there is one suspect judging by the CCTV at one of the intersections.

But many fish farmers had gone to the village hall to protest because many of their tanks had run out of oxygen due to the power outage. Outraged, the farmers took all their fish's corpses and threw them in the center of the hall.

#beatenuptechnician #electrician #typhoonaftermath #powerwatershortage #outage