There will be more at the Central Business District (CBD). Just by looking at the “pansit” of hanging electrical wires everywhere, fires anywhere are just waiting to happen. Always great dangers to life, properties and businesses.
There is no need for fires to accentuate the need for the city market to be modernized. Just by the looks of the helter-skelter arrangement of things there hits you in the gut like a dumdum bullet packed with dangers waiting to explode upon impact.
While so many people are not in favor of just having a huge building to integrate all businesses operating there including parking areas, perhaps the point was already reached where any kind of modernization is now OK rather than its present state. The smell, the filth, the rats make people come up with phrases of description hard to swallow. Abomination to health, abomination to tourism and beauty, breeding ground of diseases, epitome of bad governance, are just a few of such.
The problems did not just emerge yesterday. They have been there for decades and decades already. Are we now so paralyzed nobody can implement any worthwhile remedy to solve the problems? Extraordinary problems need extraordinary solutions. Yet there are no such things being cooked up.
All of these resulted in mumblings summed up in the question: “Were the recent fires there and similar incidents in years past attempts that did not spread wide enough to require the needed extraordinary remedies?”
Such are not the products of dirty minds but of exasperation pestering everybody for so long.
Just to sort out problems on the rightful stall holders there even appear to be unsortable. So many problems are being cited. Almost all of these, however, can be readily solved if these are made an emergency priority where the required resources will be diverted to.
Yet the attitude seems to be hoping things will be solved through the usual bureaucratic processes.
So we get back to where we began. Where and when will the next fire be?**