Friday, April 11, 2008 Wenceslao: Transcentral Highway blues By Bong O. Wenceslao Candid Thoughts
COMPLAINTS about the “sorry state” of the Transcentral Highway did not surprise me. I wrote last month in my column about this year’s Manunggal trek on the need to rehabilitate this important Cebu City-Balamban route.
The damage in some sections was obvious. Several years after the stretch was opened to traffic, nature is seeking payback.
The Transcentral Highway, initiated by former governor Emilio “Lito” Osmeña is actually the best thing that happened to that portion of the Cebu mountains. Aside from cutting travel time to Balamban and neighboring Asturias and Tuburan towns, it paved the way for the growth of the previously backward hinterland barangays it is straddling.
An underlying personal motive must have been harbored by Osmeña when he pushed for the implementation of the project considering that the highway passes his Busay property and partly benefits the Aboitizes’ industrial estate in Balamban. But it is easy to downplay that now considering the overall advantage of having the highway.
I am no driver so for a while I didn’t find any fault with the way the road was constructed. When I ride vehicles passing the area, my attention is usually drawn to the surrounding green and the crumpled paper terrain. And when I am on top, there’s the shoreline and the sea from afar to view. That is, if the clouds don’t envelope me as fog.
But when my father Tiyong passed there for the first time only a few years before he died in 2002, his verdict was, the highway is dangerous. We traveled that time to the house of my brother Maning in Langub, Asturias riding a V-hire with Tatay on the front seat. Of course I could not challenge his assertion because he was a veteran driver.
Since the highway was constructed, vehicular accidents there have been few and far between. This must be because drivers become extra-careful when negotiating the stretch knowing the danger. But I agree that some portions of the road are dangerously steep and fog and rain sometimes hamper driving.
That reminds me of the fuss created by the governor who succeeded Lito O, the lawyer activist and sometime politician Vicente “Tingting” de la Serna, in the early ‘90s. He once herded us Capitol beat reporters and brought us on a tour of the Transcentral Highway to partly point out the defects in its construction. It looks like he was right.
That was the first time I heard the phrase “as built plan” (okay, I am not getting younger so recollecting the exact line has become tricky for me, meaning, I could be wrong). This was supposed to be the construction principle followed by the contractor. He built a stretch, planned which way to go, built another stretch, planned again, etc.
I also understand that, to lessen the construction cost, the highway followed the contour of the mountain, which also ensured that only few bridges would be constructed or none at all. These “innovations” may have been good in the short term but definitely not in the long run, more so because of the kind of soil in that part of Cebu hinterlands.
But then again that is past. Since the highway is there, those tasked to maintain it, like the Department of Public Works and Highways, must carry the added burden of staving off the negative effects of the supposed defects in its construction. I understand that since the stretch was opened to traffic, the battle to maintain it has been uphill.
