TAINAN // Before their apartment tower collapsed in the earthquake at the weekend, a young couple living on the 14th floor had already been given a clue that the building was unsafe.
But it came too late.
Chen Yi-ting and her husband bought the flat in the centre of Tainan city five years ago, having relocated from an outlying district.
They had a small hiccup with the mortgage – the first bank they approached had declined their loan application without stating why. But they found another lender and moved in with their infant daughter.
Soon after, according to Ms Chen’s mother, one of the couple’s friends, who had ties to the first bank, told them that it had a policy of refusing loans to residents of the 17-storey Wei-guan Golden Dragon Building because of its poor construction.
Now, Ms Chen, 35, and her husband, Lin Wu-chong, 38, are in intensive care in separate hospitals in the southern city. She has a cracked skull and he has damaged lungs.Their seven-year-old daughter is dead.
“People from outside of the town, people like them, had no idea what was going on before they moved in,” said Ms Chen’s mother, Kuo Yi-chien.
“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.”
The two-decades-old building is at the centre of rescue efforts after the 6.4 magnitude quake struck before dawn on Saturday, with at least 26 known to have died there and more than 120 still missing in the rubble.
It was the only major high-rise building in the city of 2 million people to have completely collapsed. Its lower levels, filled with arcades of shops, piled on top of each other before the entire U-shaped complex toppled in on itself.
Ms Kuo, 61, said the building’s residents had long complained of many problems before the quake, such as tiles falling from walls, malfunctioning lifts and blocked pipes.
Ms Chen and her husband paid 3.5 million Taiwan dollars (Dh385,000) for their flat.
“We are simple minded people. We did not think it [the initial loan refusal] might have been for some other reason,” said Ms Kuo.
Tainan’s government said the building had obtained its construction permit legally and withstood a much worse quake in 1999. Centred in central Taiwan, that tremor killed 2,400 people and caused damage across the island.
The Wei-guan Golden Dragon Building secured its construction licence in 1992 and building was completed in 1994, according to government records.
Two main firms that built the tower, Wei-guan Construction and Da Hsin Engineering, have since gone out of business.
Witnesses at the scene of the collapse saw large rectangular, commercial cans of cooking oil packed inside wall cavities exposed by the damage, apparently having been used as building material.
Tainan mayor William Lai said he had asked prosecutors to investigate and that the government had hired three teams of civil engineers to inspect the building’s structure.
“When it’s completed, we’ll punish those who should be held accountable,” he said.
* Reuters