Risks of 64 tons’ Overloaded Truck on a 20 Tons' Bridge

 By Mortz C. Ortigoza

I have a one-on-one interview recently with the top honcho of the Department of Public Works & Highway who covers the town where the 490 meters long steel bridge that collapsed due to an overloaded dump truck ferrying a sand.

4th District Engineering Office’s Chief Simplicio D. Gonzales told me that he was not sanctioned when I posed to him if he was reprimanded by his superiors in the regional and national offices of the DPWH because of the tragedy at the bridge in Bayambang, Pangasinan.

Two trucks - one of them overloaded - fall  after the Carlos Romulo Bridge in Brgy. Wawa in Bayambang, Pangasinan collapsed. Photo Credit: Rappler.com

He blamed the driver of the 63.5 tons overloaded 12- wheeler dump truck as the culprit that cause a portion of the 20 tons’ capacity 1945 vintage Carlos P. Romulo Bridge or Wawa Bridge in Barangay Wawa, Bayambang, Pangasinan to fall with the big truck and an Elf truck that followed it as seen on the television.

“Alam mo ba ang overloaded niya (dump truck) ang capacity niya? 30 cubic meters equivalent to 48 tons. Buhangin niya 30 cubic meters ay equivalent sa 48 tons. Ang truck equivalent sa 15.5 tons,” he told me at his office as he juxtaposed the 63.5 tons to the vulnerable 20 tons’ capacity bridge.

He disclosed to me that he and his staff did a diligent inspection every time a fortuitous event like an earthquake hit the area:

“Nag ini-inspeksiyon kami. Walang mga indication na may mga defect kasi after ng earthquake ini-inspeksiyon iyan”.

District Engineer Gonzales was terse that the crumbled bridge was the doing of a negligent driver who drove overloaded despite the not more than 20-ton (2,000 kilos) limit.

“Oo twenty ton andoon standard namin iyan”.

Author (left, photo) and DPWH's 4th District Engineering Office’s Chief Simplicio D. Gonzales who supervises the collapsed Bayambang Bridge pose for a photo-op after the former interview him at his office in Sta. Barbara, Pangasinan.
 

Before the portion of Wawa bridge fell down, there were three bridges that fell in Catigbian town in Bohol; in Davao City; and in Majayjay town, Laguna since last year.

“It is time to evaluate the safety of our bridges,” Minority Floor Leader Senator Koko Pimentel exhorted after the one in Bayambang collapsed last Thursday.

The negligent if not unwary driver of the big rig could either be driving without professional license or bought illegally his license –as a common practice – to miscreant officials of the Land Transportation Office who live on sleaze.

Their shortcomings did not only cost tens if not hundreds of millions of pesos damaged government structure (a meter of a concrete bridge cost the government P1 million according to Gonzales) or their gruesome death being pinned by steel and concrete underneath.

Cruising a vehicle on a bridge needs common sense. A heavy truck driver should see first the 20-ton signage in the approach before he enters it.

When I was growing up in the middle and late 1970s in my hometown at M’lang, Cotabato Province during the Christian-Moro War, I saw how discernment guide those soldier-drivers  in shunning to cross the town's more or less 10-ton bridge with their armored personnel carriers like the American made M113A1s, 13.6 metric tons (combat load) AIFV-25 infantry vehicles, and tanks – probably the 25 tons Light M-41 Walker Bulldog tank - whenever they escorted those dozens screaming M809 Series 5-ton six-by-six (G908) U.S made trucks that carried the infantrymen for a battle somewhere in Maguindanao Province.

Those armored vehicles would descend to the bank of the river, crossed the river bed, and ascend the other low level bank with their caterpillar tread or tank tread “wheels”.

Disregarding the tonnage limit of my rustic town’s wooden bridge and crossed it would cost those behemoths and their imprudent drivers to have a free fall to their death underneath.

They were far cry salamabit to the careless driver of that big truck in Pangasinan that fell down but still fortunate that it spared its passengers in meeting San Pedro or Satan in the afterlife.

Is a reckless imprudence criminal and civil cases  resulting to millions of pesos' damage government property in the offing against the driver and his employer? That son of a gun I forgot to ask the DPWH's top honcho.

(Send comment to totomortz@yahoo.com)