Do rains promote incompetence in City Hall?

PAGASA, the state weather bureau, warned residents in the eastern section of the country against possible flashfloods and landslides as the outer bands of typhoon “Paolo” (international name Lan) will continue to bring rains until the weekend. Even before the weekend came, we are already getting more than our usual share of rains. However we are thankful that at least we are not getting directly hit by any typhoons at this time.

The other day I was driving to the Cebu Metropolitan Cathedral to pay respects to the remains of archbishop emeritus Ricardo Cardinal Vidal, but as I left the Cebu Country Club, the rains started pouring. When I got to Mango Avenue, the downpour was so great, I feared that if I proceeded to downtown Cebu City, it would be flooded and true enough many of my Facebook friends reported flooding in the areas that they passed by. So instead of proceeding to the cathedral, I backtracked and headed for my office. But even that was difficult because traffic was already snarled. So I went home instead.

Incidentally, because of the rains, as we already wrote in the past two weeks, the roads in Cebu City has become so badly potholed, and worse, because there is no one maintaining our roads those potholes are turning into moon craters. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the moon crater along V. Ranudo St. and City Hall personnel came to fix the road, not with asphalt but with something. But at least your car won’t scrape its bottom.

Along the entrance to Juana Osmeña Extension just at the corner of Escario Street, the pothole has become a moon crater and this was already like this when I wrote about the moon craters of V. Ranudo St. This brings us the question: Why do rains make our city engineers stop working? Mind you, Mayor Tomas Osmeña’s decades as the Chief Executive of Cebu City should have by now gave him a template on how to fix our roads even without journalists or radio commentators pointing the locations of the potholes?

Again, let me remind you that when I was Chairman of the Cebu City Traffic Operations and Management, one of the duties of our motorized traffic enforcers was to report the locations of potholes and prevent them from growing larger by putting rocks or limestone if there is no asphalt available. Alas, some good ideas are never followed through, and today Cebuano motorists suffer because City Hall just bogs down into incompetence when the rains come down.

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Doesn’t it make you wonder what the yellow trolls felt during the time of president Benigno “PNoy” Aquino III when the Ninoy Aquino International Airport was named one of the world’s worst airports? Surely you haven’t forgotten those shameful days.

This was very embarrassing to many Filipinos living here and abroad. And worst of all, NAIA had the “laglag bala” or bullet planting incident where tourists and Overseas Filipino Workers were charged by corrupt airport employees manning the X-ray machines who put bullets in their bags and accused them of smuggling prohibited or contraband items.

Well, one of the best news of the week, aside from the deaths of the Maute terrorists at the hands of the Armed Forces of the Philippines, is a report from a travel website that revealed that NAIA is no longer in the list of the worst airports in the world. What a switch from reading a survey that showed that the country’s premier airport used to be among the world’s worst and was ranked fifth worst terminal in Asia.

Kudos to Transportation Secretary Arthur Tugade for fixing this problem that NAIA General Manager Jose Angel Honrado, a close confidant of Aquino, could not solve. Who was Honrado anyway but the head of the security company owned by Aquino, which by the way figured in the infamous Luisita Massacre. This fellow had no idea about managing our premier airport, but thanks to political patronage that the Aquino Family always relied on, they put their close friends in important institutions even if they had no damn idea how to run such facilities.

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