Let there be no repetition of the T. Padilla fire!

Before anything else, I will acknowledge the arrival to our city of the elected officials coming from the municipalities of the second and third districts of Leyte. They will be here not just to visit us but more importantly to attend a DILG seminar aimed at helping them approximate their dreams for their respective local government units. So, whenever we bump into them (during their breaks), let us show our famous Cebuano hospitality. A title of a 1957 Perry Como song says it all – “Mi Casa, Su Casa”.

The recent fire that gutted down hundreds of homes and wrought disaster to a large swath of area in barangay T. Padilla pained me. In my youth, my barkada, at times, played basketball at the court in a sitio called Freedom. I did not come to know how it got its name though. And I also used to frolic there with my high school buddy, Nobo Bono Jr.

From that sad incident, we learned also a very painful lesson. It takes time for firemen to reach the fire scene. Unfortunately, this lesson is not new. In fact, it is recurrent. Every time there is a conflagration in thickly populated areas of our city, we bemoan at the lag of time between the onset of the fire and the response of our firefighters.

We are aware that our firemen are among the more skillful and better-trained units in the country. We have seen their efficiency even though some of their equipment are fairly old. Together with the volunteer Filipino-Chinese brigade, whose social concern has helped save many of us from disasters, they constitute a formidable and efficient fire-fighting group.

When fire breaks out in the inner parts of our city, penetration is the constant problem. As we all know, some of our city streets are narrow. To cite few examples, we have the road leading to Kamputhaw elementary school, the Villagonzalo II in Barangay Tejero, a part of Barangay Ermita coming from the old Osaka theater.

Wide-bodied fire trucks cannot negotiate these narrow roads because there are just too many risks involved. Rather than drive their trucks close to the site of fire and aim their high-pressure water cannons directly at the base of any fire, they are forced to park their mobiles at some farther distance. They need to roll their hoses near to the scene before they can start to combat the fire. When they are ready, they have already lost precious time. In situations like these, time, measured in seconds, is very crucial.

The sad spectacle is that we make our narrow streets even narrower. We seem to have lost our social conscience. Our own selfishness drives us to build our homes by eating into the road space. How else can we explain why the Holy Name Street, in Barangay Mabolo, lost its sidewalks to informal settlers? Some parts of Cabantan Road, in Barangay Luz have suffered the same fate.

 Our city officials have to take the T. Padilla lesson to heart. They must now identify the areas with more or less similar conditions as that of T. Padilla. Where there are many residents live in inner portions of the city, access roads to them have to be built. Because the narrow T. Villa Street prevented quick access of the firefighters, the access roads should be comparatively wide enough that succor can come in fast.

There will be resistance. It apparently is in our psyche. Affected homeowners only wish fire trucks can easily drive in when fire is raging but when they see no immediate threats, they do not give a damn about wider roads. And when asked to yield some space, they refuse to budge an inch.

This is a problem that carries heavy amount of political will. The former mayor and now Congressman Tomas Osmeña coddled informal settlers who intruded into our roads because they constituted his political bailiwick. Let us see if His Honor, Cebu City Mayor Michael Rama will meet the issue better than his predecessor. Or will we, God forbid, see the T. Padilla disaster repeated?

* * *

Email: [email protected]