CEBU, Philippines - Failure to quickly put out a fire that destroyed more than 400 houses and left roughly 3,000 people homeless is costing Cebu City fire chief Esmael Codilla his job. Mayor Michael Rama is sacking him from his post.
Codilla's impending relief is no different from the firing of former Pagasa chief Prisco Nilo. Displeased by an unprecise forecast by the weather bureau, President Noynoy Aquino had him transferred somewhere else in the bureaucracy.
But aside from the official displeasure and the swift action taken to remove the object of such displeasure, there is one other thing that threads through both incidents in like manner -- the objects of displeasure are getting a bum rap. They do not deserve their fate.
In the case of Codilla, what is the basis for concluding that he failed to put out the fire quickly enough? Is there a measure by which fires can be put out at a given time? If there is, then maybe the sacking of Codilla is justified.
If, on the other hand, there is no such standard measure, and Mayor Rama merely acted on the basis of his personal perception of how quickly a fire should be put out, then he could be treading dangerously close to grave abuse of discretion.
Codilla has been fire chief for about eight years. If Rama has grown tired of seeing his face for nearly a decade, then he should say so. After all, naming and firing fire chiefs is well within his authority to do.
But let it not be over some phantom measure over which no one in the world is truly an expert, least of all the mayor. The mayor is a lawyer by profession. Last time anyone looked, the expertise of a lawyer is as near to firefighting as singing is to scuba diving.
It is by the same token that many were aghast at the sacking of Nilo over a supposedly botched forecast. There is no precise forecast. That is why it is called a forecast in the first place. It is not even called a prediction because a prediction implies a certain definiteness.
In making forecasts, you hit some and then you miss some. The behavior of weather, just like that of a fire, can only be approximated based on past recorded patterns, and with the help of available tools. Beyond that, nobody really knows.