Sunday, June 30, 2008 Seares: ‘Ground zero’ By Pachico A. Seares News Sense
MOST of us aren’t used to the phrase “ground zero” being applied to anything other than New York’s World Trade Center before it was destroyed.
Ground zero has had meanings besides (a) the site directly above or directly below or at which a nuclear weapon explodes or (b) the target of a projectile, as a missile or bomb.
It also means, the American Heritage Dictionary says, (c) the center of rapid or intense development or change, (d) the precise location of something, or (e) the starting point.
A Palace official last Thursday sent this message to Sun.Star’s Central Newsroom: “47 bodies left ground zero for Cebu at 5 pm.”
The next morning the cadavers arrived, disfigured faces and foul smell telling everyone brave enough to come close that theirs was a horrible death.
Maybe not as horrid as being buried in a rubble of concrete and steel or beheaded by an Abu Sayyaf kidnapper. Yet, odious as comparisons are, few things can be worse than slow death in a sunken ship.
Whatever the kind of death though, relief would come with end of life.
Those left behind
Souls of riders of mv Princess of the Stars whose bodies remain in Romblon’s deep waters don’t rest, catechism teachers say. But loved ones each victim left behind also suffer anguish and rage long after divers and social workers will have gone home.
That spot off Sibuyan Island is ground zero as site of the worst sea disaster of the decade and the intense search for bodies in the overturned vessel.
It is also the starting point. Alas, to many people who lost loved ones there, ground zero can be the place in the mind where they cannot leave.
