EDITORIAL - Good work, bad work

If you go around Cebu City these days, you will notice a lot of work going on involving the cleaning, clearing and declogging of canals, culverts and esteros. If the ongoing works have something to do about the upcoming elections, nobody is complaining.

That is if the work gets done quickly and properly. It seems however that neither of the sort is happening. Weeks have passed and it seems the apparently simple work is taking ages to complete. One would have thought that speed is of the essence considering that nobody can really tell if some rain would come, even in summer.

Besides, ongoing work on roadside canals consequently narrows down the streets. Men working on the roadsides pose hazards not only to themselves but also to passing motorists. Moreover, striped warning posts intended to alert motorists are too small and hard to detect for the purpose, thus becoming hazards by themselves.

But the worst thing of all is that piles and piles of earth, dirt, garbage and other debris taken out of canals, culverts and esteros are left on the sides of the streets. For the past several weeks, these have remained uncollected and also serve to constrict the streets or pose danger to motorists.

Aside from potentially causing accidents, these piles of unwanted material, now dried under the summer sand, are fast turning into dust and other flying or airborne pollutants that could cause sickness and disease when inhaled by passersby.

Some of the work have actually been done, the men working on them gone. But only the work had been abandoned. No cleaning up after the work has taken place. And so you have a situation where you have canals, culverts and esteros that are clean but with mounds and mounds of dirt and abandoned warning poles beside them.

Leaving all these dirt is an invitation for all the work that has been done to go to naught needlessly. Good if it no longer rains. But if it does, all this collected dirt will get washed away and back into the canals, culverts and esteros from where they come from.

And then the work will have to be done all over again, at great extra cost to the city and wasted time for everybody. Whoever is in charge seems to have no idea what being thorough means. In which case, the backlash will this time become an election issue.