EDITORIAL - Unsafe bridges

More billions in taxpayers’ money have gone down the drain – this time in Cagayan province. Last Monday afternoon, the Piggatan Bridge in Alcala town crumpled purportedly under the combined weight of three truck haulers.

Fortunately, no one was killed, but seven people were injured. The destruction of the bridge, which links the provincial capital Tuguegarao to the northern towns of Cagayan, has also seriously disrupted mass transportation and supply delivery in the province.

On Feb. 28 this year in nearly Isabela province, the newly opened Cabagan-Santa Maria Bridge in Santa Maria town also collapsed as a truck transporting rocks passed through it. As in this disaster, the collapse of the Piggatan Bridge has been quickly blamed on the passage of the three supposedly overloaded trucks, each reportedly weighing from 40 to 50 tons, two of them transporting palay and the third steel.

How local officials quickly came to this conclusion on the cause of the incident is not clear. Public Works Secretary Vince Dizon said the cause of the disaster is still being determined.

There were two smaller trucks on the bridge when it broke apart. The 45-year-old bridge had a load limit of only 18 tons. Bridges and other public infrastructure, however, are supposed to undergo regular inspections and engineering interventions if needed to maintain their structural integrity.

The Piggatan Bridge is no makeshift wooden span; it is made of concrete and steel. With regular inspections and reinforcement, it is supposed to be sturdy. Heavy trucks are expected to use such bridges. What’s the use of a steel-and-concrete bridge along a major highway if it cannot be used for trucks transporting heavy loads?

And if exceeding the bridge load limit was truly the problem, there should have been stringent regulation of the use of the bridge by cargo trucks, in the light of the bridge disaster in neighboring Isabela just seven months ago.

If the practice of cutting corners and producing substandard public works infrastructure was already prevalent in the 1970s when construction of the Piggatan Bridge started, the span could still have been expanded and retrofitted in subsequent years.

Reinforcement of the bridge should have been undertaken particularly after the collapse of the Cabagan-Santa Maria Bridge. After that disaster in Isabela, public works officials vowed to subject bridges nationwide to structural integrity assessments. Apparently, they missed Piggatan Bridge. Maybe they were too busy with flood control projects.

This time, the Cagayan local government has reportedly ordered an inspection of all bridges in the province. Other local officials can do the same in their jurisdictions. They should be able to put to rest public fears of falling into a river or ground below when traversing bridges.