Unburied cement drainage culverts line the section of the road across the University of San Carlos-Talamban Campus, further narrowing an already congested highway leading to Talamban and beyond.
A huge cement box culvert lies on the recently cemented section as one nears the end of A.S. Fortuna to the national highway in Mandaue, unguarded without even a warning or cautionary sign as it sits in darkness at night.
At the Kadre-Kabankalan Road, one backhoe plows through its lonesome on a hitherto asphalted lane ostensibly preparing it for poured concrete cement.
Beside it, cars going to Mandaue trod like bullock carts through the single lane left for use which had been pockmarked with holes by the same backhoe over a week or two ago.
At A.C. Cortes Avenue, a new median isle complete with tall lamppost quickly arose even if no lanes were added on both sides of the already narrow thoroughfare leading to the old Mandaue-Mactan Bridge. The result is a jampacking of cars leading to and from Mactan using this lone thoroughfare.
Leading tangentially to the other, newer Marcelo Fernan Bridge, meanwhile, is another road repair that has further choked whatever probabilities of a diversionary route to Mactan would have been available.
Over at the South Coastal Road, in the meantime, what was designed to be a tidal barrier traps floodwaters flowing down the hills of Guadalupe and Pardo, giving SM Seaside City the image of, well, being lapped by murky brown-colored “sea”.
Is there logic to civil engineering? There must be because every year this country churns out hundreds of newbies from this discipline, with at least 10 on the list as topnotchers.
So why are we getting road repair projects covering two or three kilometers that take over a year to finish? What gives? Who decides when to repair roads and why?
I ask these questions because I can say with a fair degree of certainty that I am no stranger to road repairs and construction in a few other countries. But these do not last the whole year.
Take the drainage project at A.S. Fortuna, for example.
Why does not the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) get these projects done in different but logically planned tranches and award them to five or ten different contractors who work all at once-—even at night—to get things done way, way before the onset of the rainy season? Why must it be awarded to only one contractor, which then assigns one or two backhoes and inches forwarded in, well, literally, inches?
Why must it take more than a year to pave with cement the asphalt highway between Kadre and Kabankalan—just about a one-kilometer stretch?
Would it have been better if DPWH awarded the entire stretch to four or ten contractors who would all work at once at sections of this important thoroughfare?
Why can’t we force contactors to work at night when everyone sleeps, the way it is done in the United States, Japan, Germany and virtually all over the world?
These are questions I leave for civil engineers and contractors to ponder. There must be solutions that are out of the box.
I do not subscribe to the kind of knee-jerk response we got from the DPWH that work on these road projects would be stopped for three months to give way to Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Summit and the Ironman race.
I almost fell off my chair upon reading it on the news. Surely, I do not think those engineers at DPWH are sadists who get thrill seeing Cebuanos going through mindless traffic throughout the year—and with another three months to boot! But wait, is not the 51st International Eucharistic Congress coming in January? Will this entail once again the same knee-jerk decision to stop anew all road repairs?
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I lost a dear friend and a colleague last week, someone I could always rely upon to come to my aid in the work on museums and other related projects at the University of San Carlos as well as the Archdiocesan Museum of Cebu (former Cathedral Museum).
Archt. Ellis Puerto, head of the USC Institutional Development Office (IDO) passed away at the tender age of 43 last Sunday dawn. He will be surely and sorely missed by his wife and two kids and by all of us who knew him. Rest in peace, Ellis.
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