Hospital transport was delayed because of COVID concerns one source estimated the delay at half an hour others put it at over an hour. The vessel was docked a short drive from the National Cheng Kung hospital in Tainan, and under normal circumstances, EMTs could have had him there in 15 minutes. The critically injured worker needed to get to the hospital as quickly as possible, but first, the ship managers had to scramble to get permission to bring him on shore. He was crushed by a hydraulic door on October 9th and discovered at 5:30p.m.
He was working in the engine room of the Willem De Vlamingh, a support vessel for Belgium dredger and EPCI group Jan de Nul. The incident involved an Indonesian crew member on his first day on the job at wpd’s Yunlin OWF, according to multiple sources off-the-record. Still, this was the first work-related death I’d heard of in an emerging industry, so I asked around about it.Īs I gathered more details, I became increasingly concerned. The story, while tragic, wasn’t something I could cover for the Taipei Times, where I worked as a business reporter at the time. In late October, I got a confidential tipoff that a worker had died while building Taiwan’s offshore wind farms two weeks earlier.
