Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-bin demanded Sunday that any system breakdown similar to Friday's stoppage on the newly inaugurated Neihu mass rapid transit (MRT) line should never happen again. He spelled out the requirement while meeting with the top resident representative of the Neihu line's contractor, Canada-based Bombardier Inc. The mayor further revealed that the city government will study the feasibility of seeking compensation from the contractor over the latest breakdown's damage to the reputation of the two municipal agencies responsible for system maintenance and business operations of the MRT services -- the Department of Rapid Transit Systems and the Taipei Rapid Transit Corp. Since its July 4 inauguration, the Neihu line has suffered frequent false alarms and malfunctions. Its most serious glitch occurred Friday, when the system's power supply broke down. The failure affected 21 trains carrying more than 9,000 passengers on the Neihu/Muzha line, including 700 on three trains that were left stranded between stations. Services were not resumed until 6 a.m. the following day. Tan Kuo-kuang, the city government's deputy secretary-general who concurrently serves as head of the administration's emergency response task force, said a Bombardier engineer versed in MRT train control systems had arrived in Taiwan to help resolve the problems the Neihu line has suffered since its opening. Noting that Friday's stoppage was the result of a sudden outage of an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) system at the line's Zhongshan Junior High School station, Tan said similar problems can be avoided once a back-up electric circuit is installed, a job that will take two to three months. According to the city's contract with Bombardier, the system's reliability must reach 99 percent within eight months of the start of operations. 'We will require the contractor to strengthen its reliability testing to achieve the stated goal as soon as possible, ' Tan said. 