A new bridge and a bus rapid system for Cebu!

Today is the 67th anniversary of the sinking of the S.S. Corregidor, a Compañia Maritima vessel that left the Port of Manila (which was then at the mouth of Pasig River) on that fateful night of Dec. 17, 1941 for Cebu and on to Australia. It was literally the last ship out of Manila as war clouds had already shrouded the country. My uncle, the late Benjamin S. Avila, was on board that ship with his basketball team from the University of Southern Philippines (USP) playing an exhibition match with his alma mater, the De La Salle University (DSLU), when an hour later, the S.S. Corregidor struck a mine ironically off the island of Corregidor and broke in half and sank with 1,200 passengers on board.

Whose mine did the S.S. Corregidor struck, no one could say, but US officials then suspected that this was laid out by the Japanese mine-laying submarine I-124. Gen. Douglas MacArthur then ordered his Patrol Torpedo boats, PT-32, PT-34 and PT-35, for a search and rescue mission. These were the same PT boats that brought Gen. MacArthur on his great escape to Cagayan de Oro from Corregidor. Eventually PT-34 came to Cebu and was attacked by Japanese F1 “Pete” seaplanes and crashed off the island of Kawit… now the South Road Properties and was featured in that famous John Wayne hit black-and-white movie “They were Expendable.”

Survivors of that sinking told our family that the vessel had actually left without our uncle Bing (he was a classmate of Don Marquitos Roces). But someone recognized him and offered a pilot boat to go after the vessel, which was now at the mouth of Pasig River, and so he sailed to his untimely death. He was actually an expert swimmer, part of the swimming team of DSLU, but one survivor whom I later met, the late Dr. “Doc” Alviola, told me that my uncle went back to the cabins to help crying women and that was the last they saw of him.

All told, the PT boats rescued 282 survivors, but the exact number who perished in that wartime disaster would never be known. Some of those still living are Mrs. Adelaida Javier and that great Filipino golfer from the Del Monte Golf Course in Bukidnon, Tinong Tugot. Just for the heck of it, I checked with Wikipedia, typing S.S. Corregidor, and what do you know it turned out that this vessel used to be named the HMS Engadine, a seaplane tender that participated in the Cuxhaven Raid on Christmas Day in 1914. A couple of years later, she joined the famous Battle of Jutland in 1916. She was bought by her original owners and renamed S.S. Corregidor.

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Two important news reports coming out of Cebu bring hope for better times in 2009 despite stories of gloom and doom. First is the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) report that the construction of the P2.3-billion Cansaga Bay Bridge project that would link the north part of Mandaue to Tayud in the town of Consolacion and Tayud in Liloan has been awarded. This is a project that is designed to ease the traffic problems that residents of Cebu City or Mandaue are suffering when they drive to northern Cebu.

Although I still have to hear from DPWH how they would solve the traffic nightmare from a bottleneck that the DPWH is creating as the two major roads converge in the town of Liloan, I would like to believe that our engineers in DPWH are not stupid and are hopefully mapping out plans to avoid this traffic nightmare a few years from now when they finish this road.

Another great news that Cebuanos would love to hear is that the Cebu City Council has passed a joint resolution declaring a policy direction for the establishment of a public urban mass transport system, which is the Bus Rapid Transport (BRT) that we’ve written about earlier. Next move is to get funding agencies to fund this project and it seems that the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the World Bank (WB) are keenly interested in this bus-based project.

Of course, I believe that bureaucratic snags would still throw a monkey wrench into this project. But our embracing the BRT project is the Cebuanos’ way of saying that we do not want Cebu to grow like Metro Manila, where they have huge traffic jams despite the various Light Rail Transit (LRT) systems traversing the nation’s capital. It has been told that LRTs all over the world are losing money every time a passenger rides a train and therefore they are heavily subsidized by their governments. BRTs, on the other hand, are cheaper to build and operate (construction is less than two years) and therefore have a higher return on investment than LRTs.

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For e-mail responses to this article, write to [email protected]. Bobit Avila’s columns can also be accessed through www.philstar.com. He also hosts a weekly talkshow, “Straight from the Sky,” every Monday, 8 p.m., only in Metro Cebu on Channel 15 of SkyCable.