Taichung City Government has been promoting disaster-free construction certificates since June 2012; by November 1st of this year, City Mayor Hu will have awarded Disaster-free Construction Certificates to 16 units and Excellent Supplier Awards to three construction companies to set up good models for industry. In the meantime, he announced that the“Taichung LOHAS Website” organized by Taichung Land Administrative Department provides a platform for the public to search for disaster-free certified construction projects, real housing markets, major governmental constructions, public transportation, school district and other information for references to purchase a house.
Mayor Hu indicated that the construction industry has always been the leading industry in Taichung and construction was indeed essential for prosperous local development. However, as the construction scale becomes bigger and more prosperous, the construction process is crucial in terms of safety and guarantees for the workers. He emphasized that every detail is important and could lead to a series of mistakes if caution is not exercised; therefore construction safety is crucial to reduce occupational accidents. Occupation accidents are irrecoverable damage to the workers and their families. He especially asked the Labor Affairs Bureau to take part of the responsibility in order to protect the workers. Mayor Hu then expressed his gratitude to those certified companies and hoped that all the industries would promote construction safety together in order to reduce accidents and protect workers.
The Chairman of the Taichung Real Estate Development Association, Chia-Ming Wei, stated that it was a brave move of Taichung City Government to first, promote disaster-free construction among all local governments by disclosing construction safety and house pricing to encourage the pubic to monitor on construction safety; furthermore, the Disaster-free Certificate is good marketing material for house selling and an incentive with which to persuade the construction supplier to enhance construction safety and reduce accidents. It is hoped that in the future, the government will be able to work more on construction safety by encouraging disciplinary measures, integration of local resources, and experience exchange.

Director General of Labor Affairs Bureau, Shu-Huei Lai, indicated that Taichung City Government will enhance labor inspections to implement disaster-free construction, especially public construction. Director Lai further expects that it will encourage the private construction industry to pay attention to safety issues; for those good model companies, the margin could be reduced to 50% for rewards. Since the disaster-free construction project has been promoted, there are 40 construction units that have participated and no casualty cases have occurred since. Those companies can be divided into three categories based on the construction value. The awarded units of the year are Cheng-Chung-Hen Construction Co., Ltd., Yung-Yeh Construction Co., Ltd. and Ming-Shen Construction Co., Ltd. They all contributed in enhancing construction safety and reducing occupational injury and are role models for the construction industry in Taiwan.
There are 64 construction projects participating in the disaster-free program and 16 of these had already completed without any disaster. One of the special cases was IKEA construction conducted by RUENTEX Precise Engineering Co., Ltd.; they arranged high standard construction safety as a role model. It is hoped that the whole industry will be able to learn from them and establish human-oriented core values to invest on establishing a safe, healthy, happy working environment for construction workers.