Fixing weaknesses in the laws

COMMONSENSE

- MARICHU A. VILLANUEVA

The Isabela bridge collapsed on Feb. 27. No report yet. Red flags issued years before were ignored. And yet, there was not even any earthquake event when the Cabagan-Santa Maria bridge in Isabela collapsed. An alleged overloaded truck was pinpointed as the culprit for causing the collapse of the newly retrofitted suspension bridge.

President Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos Jr. (PBBM) echoed the initial report to him on the cause of collapse as largely due to "under design" of the suspension bridge. PBBM validated the report after he and Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) Secretary Manuel Bonoan went to the site of the collapsed portions of the bridge. To date, the DPWH has yet to submit its full investigation on the bridge collapse.

We could only envy how quickly government authorities of Thailand came out with its incident report on the collapse of a building during the magnitude-7.7 earthquake on March 28 that rocked Bangkok and Myanmar. Thai government building engineers released its official report on April 1 that pointed to twisted and bended steel bars as evidence of the "substandard" quality of steel products from Xin Ke Yuan Steel Corp. of China used in the collapsed building, which was still under construction when the earthquake struck.

Unfortunately, the root cause of such substandard quality of steel bars is also existing everywhere here in the Philippines.