Does anyone have a contingency plan?

At the height of the devastating earthquake in Japan some years back, a 100-meter bridge fell down due to the earthquake and stopped the famous Shinkansen (Bullet) Train service from Tokyo to Osaka. The officials of the Japanese National Railway were profuse in their apologies that it took them 24-hours to temporarily fix the downed railroad bridge. They were apologizing that it took them 24-hours to resume operations because it was the first time that a railway bridge went down due to an earthquake.

That incident should have been imprinted in the brains of our Department of Public Works and Highways  officials because it has taken them more than nearly a week not to fix the downed Dumlog Bridge in Sibonga, but to find an alternative route for trucks and buses to use in the meantime that the bridge is unserviceable. This only goes to show that our DPWH officials never prepared themselves for any contingency plans. But like what I already said, people in the DPWH were on Christmas vacation. So when the approaches of the bridge collapsed, there was no one from the department to turn to when the rest of the south was cut-off from the mainland.

What we saw in our Facebook photos were a bunch of enterprising residents who built a rickety footbridge, where the people who built that bridge were exacting a P5.00 fee from anyone who wanted to cross the river. Some friends from Facebook cried out "Extortion." But is it really extortion? Should we condemn people from getting money from passengers for the convenience of crossing the river via their hastily built bridge?

What we ought to be doing is to chastise the officials of Sibonga and the DPWH for not immediately reacting to this disaster. It should have been the government who has all those equipment who should have constructed that temporary footbridge. But then, all government officials were on official holiday and they really did not care to act swiftly to help those who were stranded due to Tropical Storm Seniang.

What gets my gall is that Deputy Presidential Spokesman Abigail Valte defended the government agencies when she learned that many Local Government Unit officials complained that no one issued any warnings about Seniang. I know this for a fact because on the evening of Dec.29th, I was tracking this storm through my good friend, Chris Go's Facebook account where he showed us the US Navy weather center, which revealed that Seniang was going to hit Cebu within three hours of that bulletin. Indeed by 2:00AM of Dec.30th, Seniang already struck 45 kilometers south of Cebu City and the towns of Ronda and Sibonga were devastated. We prepared well for Typhoon Ruby, but not for Seniang.

We gathered from news reports that Mayor Mariano Blanco III of the town of Ronda complained bitterly that the Department of Social Welfare and Development  has not gone out of their way to help the residents of Ronda. Of course,people in the DSWD were on holiday vacation, too. Again, this is something that Ms. Valte should look into rather than simply defend those incompetent government agencies without checking things for herself.

What happened to us in Cebu only proves that we have not learned our lessons from super typhoon Yolanda. There were a lot of talks about prepositioning relief goods and services in case of an unexpected typhoon. But what happened here is very typical of us Filipinos; we are all good in talks and do nothing! Barbara Tuchman once quipped, "Those who do not remember their history is doomed to repeat them." So here we are, not learning from what happened in Yolanda, that is why we are constantly repeating our mistakes.

In my book, a DPWH official assigned in the Province of Cebu should come up with an inventory of all the bridges in their respective districts and come up with an emergency route in case those bridges collapse. For sure, those routes already existed when those bridges were constructed. So in the end, if only they kept proper records, those emergency routes would be on the file for each bridge.

With that done, it would have been easy for DPWH to come up with simulated exercises for each and every bridge in the Province of Cebu so that when a particular bridge in a certain municipality collapses, it would be very easy to go into emergency mode to either fix the broken bridge or if that is not possible, then build an alternate route the motorists could use while the bridge would be under repair.

At this point, the only positive thing we learned from DPWH is that they have promised to finish the steel bridge before the Sinulog comes. So we are looking at a two-week timetable. Let us see if the DPWH can pull some kind of miracle in the south! But rather than wait for miracles, I would like to see the contingency plans of DPWH in the hope that when this happens to us again, they will be more than ready to handle the problem.

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