Taipei - A 20-member Taiwan rescue team headed Friday to
China to join Chinese rescuers in looking for survivors of an
earthquake in which 21,500 people have so far been confirmed dead.
'All of our team members, who have various international rescue
experiences, are anxious to join the mainland rescuers to find as
many survivors as possible,' Ou Chin-der, leader of the team and
former deputy mayor of Taipei, said before departure to the
south-western province of Sichuan.
Taiwan's Mandarin Airlines, which took the team to the provincial
capital of Chengdu, was expected to transport back home about 100
Taiwan tourists stranded at Chengdu's airport, airlines officials
said. About 1,000 Taiwanese are stranded in Sichuan in the wake of
Monday's quake.
Bill Chang, director of the Civil Aeronautics Administration, said
three other airlines would each dispatch a flight to Sichuan later
Friday to take tourists home.
Fourteen Taiwan tourists are missing in the quake. Their bus was
located via satellite images at a spot 10 kilometres from the
epicentre in Wenchuan county, but the whereabouts of the passengers
were unknown, officials at Taiwan's Travel Agent Association said.
Earlier, Taiwan media reported that a Taiwan satellite recorded a
sharp drop in ionospheric density above Sichuan before the
earthquake, verifying previous measurements that seismic activity
affects ionospheric density and giving hope that one day earthquakes
might be predictable.
Taiwan's Formosa-3 satellite was measuring the number of charged
particles in the ionosphere, the uppermost part of the atmosphere,
above Sichuan before the quake. It found that on the eve of the
quake, the number of such particles dropped by half to 600,000 in the
atmosphere about 1,000 square kilometres around Wenchuan, the quake's
epicentre, the China Times said
Since then, Formosa-3, which was launched by the Taiwan National
Space Organization in 2006, has recorded ionospheric density after 63
earthquakes measuring magnitude-5 or above, revealing a sharp drop in
ionosphere density in 70 per cent of these cases.
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