Another accident in Iloilo

AMDG

Yes, it has happened again. And it’s worse than that Britney Spears song with the similar title. Much, much worse. That’s saying a lot considering how bad the song is.

This has nothing to do with the PSE, but let me just gripe here.

A few entries ago, I wrote about how my younger brother got into a car accident, and how that accident may have been avoided if only our local government leaders and traffic cops had even just half of the initiative and work ethic of a sloth (yes, those idiots are lazier and dumber than sloth, by far).

You see, this was what happened. I was driving home one night at around fifty kilometers per hour. I was in our Hyundai Starex, the same one my bro got into an accident in several months back. As usual, it was dark, and streetlights weren’t working. To make road visibility worse, it was drizzling and the road had so much puddles it was like driving on a shallow lake. Suddenly, I see something that looked like a rock on the right side of the road. Too late to brake or swerve, I ran over it, making our good but accident-prone vehicle jump up its right side. I still managed to drive the car home, although the steering wheel was now badly veering to the right and there seemed to be some clunking noises coming from that side too (I checked the wheel, but it wasn’t flat).

I went through the motions when I got home: parked the car, got a flashlight, got down on all fours and tried to see what the damage was. Knowing as much about cars as a blonde bombshell, I didn’t really get far with the car inspecting thing. So got the keys to our pick up and went back to the crime scene (yes, crime scene, with the said term more specifically justified as the following: the scene of an accident caused by the stupidity and ineptness of our local government leaders that’s just so appallingly vulgar, it should be a crime). Guess what I saw? A log!!! As in, a wooden log around half a foot thick and around five feet long just lying there, right smack in the middle of a lane! Imagine that! A “highly urbanized center” whose national roads have a LOG in the middle of it! Seriously!

Looking around the scene again I saw why it was even harder to see before I ran over it. Coming down from Tabuc Suba bridge in Jaro, there’s a long stretch of road where the streetlights don’t work. Farther down the road, the lights come on when you reach Iloilo Supermart. That means when I was coming down from the bridge, the wooden log was not just hard to see because there were no streetlights and because of the pooling water, but also because it was backlit by the lights farther down the road. Imagine if I had been driving a motorcycle...

Fast forward. After everyone found out about the accident, theories came out as to why that log was there: “there’s a guy selling meat on a table on the sidewalk where you ran over the log, so maybe he put the log there so cars won’t run through the puddles on the road and splash water on him” or “it was the jeep drivers who put it there for their strike”. Right now, I don’t care so much why it was there as much as I care why nobody ever took it out. After all, our “honorable” governor and his “honorable” councilor son drive through that same road. Are they so short-sighted that they don’t see the hazard of a piece of log lying around on an ill-lit national highway? What about our traffic cops? Too busy scratching their balls? And our “honorable” mayor? Too busy worrying about his case at the Ombudsman about that white elephant housing project (that case got halted though…wonder why…)?

You see, it’s not just the sorely lacking infrastructure that’s the problem here in Iloilo, it’s also that – one – most Ilonggos don’t even know how to use infrastructure properly and that – two – local government’s just sitting on its ass instead of enforcing discipline and improving roads.

The only reason I heard for the accident that doesn’t come back to local government incompetence was from my younger bro: he said, "that car’s got plenty of bad luck". Me, I’d rather blame all those monkeys we call honorable. Makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.