Negligent local officials, drivers decimating us

You can’t make the same mistake twice, it is said, for the second time you make it, it is no longer a mistake but a choice, conscious and deliberate. What if the third or more times, is it by habit?

In July 2000 typhoon toppled a 70-foot-high pile of garbage at the Payatas dump in Quezon City. More than 200 died under the toxic heap, about the same number never recovered, another 200 injured, 80 shanties flattened. Rescuers collapsed from noxious fumes. The site should have kept shut, as it was two years prior, and over 600 scavengers, including children, relocated. Residents kept warning about the perilous pileup. Mayor Ismael Mathay was blamed for the mistake of negligence.

This recurred in August 2011 as heavy rains weakened the riprap of Irisan dump in Baguio City. Over 1,500 tons of trash crumbled down the hillside onto the village below in the municipality of Tuba, Benguet. Twenty-two corpses were recovered; another 12 remained lost; two-dozen middle-class houses were destroyed. The reeking, smoldering heap remained un-bulldozed for many months afterwards. Seven years Tuba had been telling Baguio to haul away the garbage heap and close down the dump. Mayor Mauricio Domogan was accused of purposely playing deaf to the pleas.

Then last week it happened yet a third time. Four workers of the Rizal Provincial Sanitary Landfill were buried alive under refuse that collapsed during a storm in Rodriguez town. Immediately environment authorities summoned the private contractor International Swims Inc. that was operating the 19-hectare facility. Yet what about Rodriguez Mayor Cecilio Hernandez and Rizal Gov. Casimiro Ynares III, have they no liability? The municipal hall and provincial capitol had control over the site, having fought over and then sharing jurisdiction in 2007.

To begin with, the landfill is a misnomer. In landfilling the biodegradable trash is compacted then laid over with soil. In Rodriguez, Rizal, unsegregated organic and plastic trash obviously was dumped high, thus emitting methane and caving in under heavy rains. Why was it allowed?

Expect many more garbage piles to collapse, kill, and maim. It’s now the habit of local officials nationwide to gloss over the sanitation and safety of constituents — as they take kickbacks of garbage collection deals. The Ecological Waste Management Act forbade dumping and endorsed landfills since 2001. Yet local governments have not instituted requisite recycling and segregation to lessen the volume of rubbish for landfilling. Truly there’s cash in trash — more of it the more garbage trucks are contracted to haul. Isn’t lucrative garbage contracting the reported spark of the Manila mayoralty battle royal between Fred Lim and Erap Estrada?

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It’s but right for the public to raise hell against New Year’s Eve killings and maimings by indiscriminate revelry gunfire. Shouldn’t there be as loud a howl against the daily killings-maimings by reckless drivers of pedestrians, motorists, and commuters?

This week, as is usual, dozens of citizens were slain or crippled by motorcycle, car, taxicab, jeepney, bus, and truck crashes. They innocently were just driving, carpooling or commuting to work or home, or crossing streets on errands. Then — wham — drowsy, drunk or drug-crazed or plain untrained drivers hit them.

Such is what happened Tuesday to 20-year-old coed Marie Cennie Inson. A cement mixer bumped a jeepney then crushed her at the stop where she was waiting for a ride to school. Four jeepney passengers were injured. Inson died while being rescued from excruciating pain; another life needlessly lost, another family left grieving. The wayward truck driver’s excuse, again as is usual among those brutes, is that he lost control of the wheel when the brakes failed. He was speeding, of course.

Not to forget, many citizens too are rendered permanently or briefly disabled, so unproductive, because hit by falling debris from high-rise constructions.

Shouldn’t officials enforce traffic and construction safety rules more strictly in their locales? Isn’t it time for lawmakers to enact stiffer penalties and fines for recklessness and endangerment of others?

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Navy Seabees (Construction Brigade, CB) have erected shelters in typhoon-devastated Cateel, Boston, and Baganga towns, Davao Oriental. Designed as calamity refuge for 780 families each, the structures can also serve as meeting and social halls in better times. About 22,000 naval personnel pitched in a day’s meal each for the building materials, matched by the Harbor Center Port Terminal Inc. and the Church of Latter Day Saints Charity. The town councils provided the land and assured the upkeep. Typhoon Pablo, whose 185-kph winds leveled several villages in the three towns, was the strongest to hit Mindanao in two decades.

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