Days after the catastrophic gas explosions in Greater Kaohsiung, the cause is still veiled behind layers of finger-pointing, while the blasts have revealed more tattered urban planning and broken governmental coordination than ruptured pipelines.
LCY Chemical Corp, widely believed to be the most likely suspect in the explosions, named CPC, Taiwan — the state-run company that installed the pipelines in the area in 1990 and within two years handed one of the three pipelines over to Taiwan Polysilicon Corp, which was later bought by and merged with LCY in 2006 — as the regular inspector and maintainer for the pipelines.
