Taiwan bridge collapses, sending truck plunging onto fishing boats

By CNN
October 1, 2019 | 10:55 AM

A 140-meter (459-foot) bridge has collapsed in northeast Taiwan, sending an oil tanker in the water and killing at least two people in fishing boats below.

Video posted online by Taiwan legislator Wang Ting-yu showed the bridge falling into the water at Nanfangao harbor in Yilan County on Tuesday morning local time.

According to Taiwan’s state-run Central News Agency, the truck fell onto a number of fishing boats and sparked a fire.

At least 12 people were injured, the Yilan County Fire Bureau said, with rescue operations continuing in the evening. Two dead bodies had been found at 8 p.m. local time, CNA reported.

“We hope everyone can be safely rescued in the shortest amount of time,” Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen said, according to CNA.

Wang said the cause of the collapse was being investigated.

Analysis: The world Washington built is fraying. What comes next?

By J.J. Green
August 20, 2026 | 8:57 PM

The United States is confronting a global security environment that increasingly resembles the outcome its Cold War adversaries once hoped to produce: a divided West, weakened alliances, economic exhaustion, multiple simultaneous wars and declining confidence in American leadership. That does not mean today’s crises were orchestrated according to some surviving Soviet master plan. The Soviet Union is gone, and the threats facing Washington now come from several different states with different interests. But the strategic effect is strikingly familiar. Early NATO assessments of Soviet intentions warned that Moscow sought to weaken the democratic powers, deny the West a secure European base and ultimately exhaust North America economically. Now, NATO says Russia is again trying to reconfigure the Euro-Atlantic security order through military force, sabotage, cyberattacks, coercion and disinformation. The difference is that much of the pressure now confronting the West is occurring simultaneously — and some of the damage to alliance cohesion is self-inflicted.

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