By Robert B. Roque, Jr.
Last Monday, the Piggatan Bridge in Alcala, Cagayan, collapsed just as three fully loaded trucks, each carrying about 18 tons of palay, crossed its span. Built more than three decades ago and designed for lighter traffic, the bridge gave way in seconds, cutting off northern barangays from the town center and forcing motorists to detour through Gattaran and Baggao.
Authorities quickly blamed the overloaded trucks. I don’t intend to absolve negligence or liability on the part of the truckers, but that’s the easy explanation for what happened. The harder truth, though, is that government, not the truckers, bears the responsibility of ensuring that public infrastructure keeps pace with the times.
Rural bridges built when the local economy moved by carabao are now expected to handle container trucks and farm trailers. Strengthening or retrofitting them should have been the basic duty of — wait, that agency would that be? Oh, the Department of Public Works and Highways! The problem is, this duty seems to be the DPWH’s afterthought, only when things go wrong.
Quite frankly, if the DPWH were half as diligent in inspecting structures as it is in greasing palms, this collapse would not have happened. The agency’s own corruption, now infamous in international news for rigged bids, kickback chains, and ghost projects, has eroded its foundations.
No one would be surprised if this bridge turns out to be another casualty of substandard materials and negligent maintenance. In fact, Secretary Vince Dizon, who inherited this den of rot, now looks older than his uncle. Who wouldn’t, week after week, be weighed down by discovering decades of malpractices and being solely responsible for cleaning them all up?
The extent of this mess, notoriously attached to the DPWH, runs deep and down to the very classrooms meant to build our future. Just a day after the bridge’s collapse, the DPWH admitted to another scandal — around 2,200 unfinished classrooms nationwide.
Education Secretary Sonny Angara himself revealed that over a thousand DPWH-turned-over school buildings were incomplete or unusable. Earlier at the start of the school year, he even warned that, at the rate of budget and work put in, it would take 55 years to erase the country’s 165,000-classroom backlog.
Isn’t that statement a lot sadder now that we know how deeply rotten the DPWH, before Dizon, has been running its affairs? I’m surprised Angara is not up in arms! Or perhaps, he’s avoiding outrage because he was once part of the Senate that signed off on budgets later discovered to fund these ghost projects.
If he is clean and free of the mud that Sen. Ping Lacson described as “almost all senators had budget insertions” during the 19th Congress, then now that he is DepEd Chief, Angara must carry the moral duty to call out the crooked system.
Let the people see him angry, furiously protective of students robbed of classrooms and of their futures. Heads should roll, budgets must be stripped of grease, and the public must no longer foot the bill for DPWH’s incompetence that results in destruction and delay.
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