At least one of the representatives of the public utility companies that failed to meet the Oct. 27 birthday deadline of Mayor Michael Rama to remove all dangling wires and redundant poles was candid to admit that completing the task on the new May 1 deadline was “impossible.”
“I signed that (pledge) but I really told them that it cannot be done by May 1. I know the work load because I was personally supervising our team when we did the first phase on Osmeña Boulevard. It took us three months to clear that area of dangling wires and take out some of our poles. That deadline is simply impossible to meet,” said Engr. Cayetano Cruz of the Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. (PLDT).
The new six-month timetable to finish bundling spaghetti wires and removing dilapidated poles was set by Mayor Rama after he went ballistic over the low compliance of their pledges.
He turned 61 on the deadline, but didn’t get a complete birthday present.
Rama can be emphatic, even theatrical when he gets worked up about a goal.
He showed his displeasure by having staff place chainsaws on the conference table. And turning them on. Did the visitors wonder if the equipment was aimed at their heads?
Utility representatives listened to the mayor sermon them on responsibility , public safety and promises. Before they could give their individual accomplishment reports, he jumped in and asked them to boil it down to a “percentage” of completion.
The self-declared overall performance was below ten percent to 20 percent.
Who wouldn’t be upset with this kind of birthday offering? He apologized later for the dramatic emphasis, but really, mayor, who can apologize enough for the unnecessary loss of a young life?
The messy wires are a matter of aesthetics.
But it’s the chaotic burden of multiple wires and cables on poles that are dilapidated, rotting, just waiting to collapse , or as in the case of 13-year-old Ralph Bureros, an accident waiting to happen.
It did and the boy is dead. A passing truck snagged low-lying wires one evening in July, and the concrete pole of PLDT in barangay Tinago fell on Ralph while he was waiting by a barbecue station for his food order. Two other youngsters near him were also injured.
If utility companies complain that there is not enough time to finish correcting facilities that pose a safety hazard for the public, who will complain for the Bureros family that the years Ralph was entitled to live out have run out? Ask the father, Edmundo, who said in October just days before All Souls’ Day, that people have forgotten about Ralph but that he still wakes up at night, missing his son and visits darkened streets hoping to meet the ghost of his child.
It’s an agonzing sense of time for a father. We hope his pain feeds a sense of urgency in the efforts of private sector utilities to do what’s right to prevent anybody else in Cebu City from falling victim again to the neglect of enterprises who earn a profit for serving the public.
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