For the nth time - enact a law to create the NTSB!

It’s been eight years since the day of infamy happened in New York City that the world now fondly calls 9/11, when the Twin Towers, the tallest buildings in the New York Skyline where struck by two airliners (the other two were crashed on the Pentagon, while one crashed in a meadow) and it resulted in the deaths of 2,993 people, including the Al-Qaeda hijackers. Thus the war against terror escalated into a larger war that begun with the war in Afghanistan and spread into Iraq, which in hindsight, we already know was a serious mistake by the Bush Administration and now, it’s back in Afghanistan with no end in sight.

How this war will end, we cannot tell. But definitely, it is taking longer than World War I, World War II, the Korean War or the Vietnam War. I guess that’s because this is a war without a timetable. Today, the focus on Afghanistan with the wily Taliban, that makes its money from growing opium and selling it to the nation with the largest appetite for illegal drugs and that’s the United States of America. This is why US Marines are still getting killed in Afghanistan, eight years after 9/11.

If only the Americans spent the billions of US dollars on their war machinery to reduce, suppress, quell or eliminate illegal drug use in America, then those Afghan farmers under the gun by the Taliban might just look for another agricultural product to plant instead of maintaining those poppy fields because the demand will surely disappear, thus saving more lives. Meanwhile, even with the new reformist American President Barrack Obama, we still can’t see an end to the war against terrorism.

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Just when the public’s consciousness about the sinking of the M/V Princess of the Stars was starting to fade, then came that unexpected reminder of the sinking of the Doña Paz that was featured in National Geographic’s special true-to-life drama series dubbed “Asia’s Titanic” that we wrote just last Aug. 28th. Then last Sunday, another ship disaster struck when the SuperFerry 9 sunk off the coast of Zamboanga Peninsula.

Call it a stroke of luck that the majority of its 968 passengers and crew survived this sinking and we can only attribute this to the constant drilling of the ship’s crew for emergency procedures. But what really caused the SuperFerry 9 to sink should be the focus of Maritime investigators. But even before a Maritime inquiry board could be created to look into this disaster, the Maritime Industry Authority (MARINA) suddenly issued an order to ground all the vessels of the Aboitiz Transport System (ATS).

I don’t know why the MARINA made this very rash decision, when they don’t even know what caused the SuperFerry 9 to sink? In the United States, they have a National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) that recommends the grounding of entire fleets of aircraft if they found out from a recent crash that it was caused by a faulty design or a part that broke down. The grounding is done to prevent the same occurrence from happening again. So back to the question, why did MARINA ground the vessels of the ATS? I reckon it was a knee-jerk reaction to this sinking just to show to the public that the government agency tasked to handle domestic shipping is doing something about this tragedy.

Since the sinking of the Doña Paz 20 years ago up to the sinking of Princess of the Stars the Philippines has gotten that ugly reputation as the Ship Disaster Capital of the World. Yet, like all the problems that we Filipinos face in our daily lives… we never learn from our mistakes! We’ve already written many times before that the greatest problem that we Filipinos face is the reality that we never fix the problems that bug this country. This is why every now and then, we get reports of ugly bus accidents and ship disasters because the government agencies tasked to regulate these transport groups care more about helping the operators than the passengers who, more often than not, are always the helpless victims. 

That Pres. Gloria Macapagal Arroyo (GMA) once more pointed out that it is the MARINA (for those bus accidents, it is the LTFRB or the PNP) that would investigate this latest sinking will not result in a fair investigation simply because they are the same regulatory bodies that regulate those shipping or bus companies. I have said it here so many times before that what this country needs is for Congress to create our version of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) to do the investigating, while leaving the regulatory agencies to do their job of regulating the transport industry.

Alas, we have a Congress that doesn’t have the intellect to even copy the US NTSB but only approves Greyhound racing as if we needed it so badly!

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