Yes. Yes. And yes.
Yet…
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This should be the title of its own thread.
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Wow. That bereavement payment is a slap in the face. 100M isn’t enough - let alone 100k. Fuck them.
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Another fire claims give victims in a row, a whole family. In Kaohsiung.
I saw that on TV earlier. Horrible.
In my experience the city building and fire departments are feverishly obsessed with monitoring safety regulation compliance. They can’t be in all places at all times to ensure every location is following every regulation. Unless maybe there was some procedure related to the building repair work that was overlooked/fudged.
You don’t think red envelopes were involved? 
I doubt it, possible it was something like that, but probably the building management just went ahead and turned stuff off. A lot of people play these games, if an inspection is made they’ll just correct it and not worry about it until then. The government could ramp up penalties for violations so people would take things more seriously.
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Mayor Ko is sensible in waiting until a full investigation is completed, but that sounds most likely to me. I don’t think there’s much the Fire Chief can do if morons find it more convenient to turn off the alarms and sprinklers.
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I hope you’re right, Karen. 
It seems like figuring out how to keep people from gaming the system would be a little easier to do that rooting out corruption.
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Short of a major cultural shift, they have to start meting out some serious punishments. Not just fines.
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Yeah, but this is hard to do when politicians are so afraid of getting on the bad side of big business. I can see Ko taking it on, but what about at the national level?
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True. It’s pretty much buyer beware when entering establishments
That’s the thing, the system is based on a certain amount of assumption of good intentions. If you’re not compliant there are a couple of opportunities for you to get back on track, from various licensed contractors that are supposed to monitor things (that’s what they do for schools anyway) and make compliance reports to the fire people, who will come and do their annual and other minor inspections. Same for the building agency. At each step they’ll give you a short period of time to come into compliance if they find any problems, without penalty. There’s no way to get 100% compliance on things I guess but it always seemed to me the system left too many gaps that would be bound to cause problems on occasion.
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They could start by changing to spot inspections instead of giving businesses several days to prepare for them. That’s pretty much a recipe for shenanigans…especially when it comes to shady businesses like KTVs.
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That would definitely help.
I mean, who would even consider turning off alarms and sprinklers in a place of entertainment and keep the place open? What sort of person thinks like that?
My bet is the top boss was demanding the place stay open during renovation and a subordinate figured out a way to make this possible. It’ll be OK. Nothing will go wrong.
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Apparently, the SOP there was to only turn on the fire safety systems for inspections. Not sure how high up that policy went.
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The fire safety measures were probably something like that
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