Editorial - Don't ban people from dumptrucks

The recent accident in Barili, in which a local government dumptruck carrying mourners to a funeral lost its brakes and flipped over, resulting in the deaths of 10 people, was what it was — an accident.

And the knee-jerk reaction of certain national government agencies to promptly issue directives henceforth banning the use of dumptrucks for funeral corteges or for any other purpose involving the ferrying of people is what it is — knee jerk.

There may have been factors leading to the accident that one can legitimately take issue with against the local government that owned the dumptruck. The faulty brakes, for instance, is a maintenance issue the vehicle owner cannot escape from.

But this does not detract from the fact that accidents happen for reasons that only God knows. If an accident is bound to happen, it will, even to the best maintained vehicle. And they do not have to involve only vehicles that carry people.

In other words, an accident, no matter how tragic and painful, is too flimsy a reason to suddenly ban the use of dumptrucks to ferry people, especially since the ban cannot guarantee no similar accidents will happen involving either dumptrucks or any other type of vehicle.

True, ferrying passengers was not the reason dumptrucks, as their name suggests, were created in the first place. But under certain circumstances, and in certain places, dumptrucks serve this “unforeseen” purpose of ferrying people rather well.

Those who have been around, especially to the poor and remote mountain areas, can attest to the fact that these dumptrucks have become almost indispensable to the conduct of the daily lives of the people who live there.

If the reach of government to these far-flung areas cannot be as often as necessary or as meaningful as intended, at least the occasional presence of dumptrucks is enough to suit the many public service requirements that the under-served constituencies can hope to be ever satisfied.

Out there in the mountains of rural Philippines, the dumptruck is a god-send multipurpose vehicle that a far-from-omnipresent government should consider lucky to have as a representative, instead of ban as a harbinger of tragic death on account of one unfortunate accident.