Last Friday morning, traffic stood still at the Teacher’s Camp, BGH and South Drive areas. It went on for hours and hours. By lunch time, , the main street beside Tachers Camp )Leonard Wood Road that goes to the Botanical Gardens and then to the Pacdal Area could only be opened to one-way traffic. Traffic officers would allow vehicles going to Pacdal for a few minutes and then stop them to allow those coming from the opposite direction, those going to the center of town from Pacdal to have right of passage on the road for a few minutes also. The alternating traffic made the flow of vehicles soo slow, causing clogging of vehicles on both ends, resulting in gridlock traffic in nearby areas.
As gathered, the main causes were pine trees that got toppled down by the strong winds on the night of Thursday and in the early morning of Friday. Those trees caused several electric posts of BENECO to fall.
While it was of some comfort that the problem was attended to immediately, humongous damage were suffered by a lot of people whose schedules that Friday were irretrievably ruined.
The main question that has to be answered by authorities is, “Could the disaster been avoided? Could some proactive measures been adopted to avoid the aggravation caused to a lot of city commuters?”
Certainly! Trees and even electric posts that are in danger of toppling down when strong winds come are usually visible to the naked eye. You don’t need experts for that. A simple ocular inspection would suffice. Such posts or trees should then be changed or cut before they result in losses of “life and limb.”
So the next question is, “Why was that not done?” The answer is quite simple. Incompetence on the part of people in the city government who should have taken care of the matter. Incompetence, is a heavy word but it is what it is. Plain and simple incompetence.
At this point, however, the more important question is, “What will the city do about the incompetents among its ranks?”**