BEHIND THE SCNES

Alfred P. Dizon
Car-less Sundays /Dismal performances

BAGUIO CITY – Some city officials may have deemed they were helping the environment by closing Session Road on Sundays to vehicles for the reason that people have to breathe cleaner air at the main thoroughfare.

True, everybody needs cleaner air, but closing a road, the city’s convergence point at that, is going over the hill. Making the air of Baguio cleaner needs a macro solution, not a micro adhesive tape.

If our city officials would like to lessen air pollution, they could hold a meeting with regional Dept. of Transportation and Communications director Bong Mandapat and Environment officials like on ways and means to lessen smoke coming out from vehicles. Or better, they could hold a public hearing on the matter since a lot of people, not only businessmen, are affected by the road’s closure.

Closing Session Road even for a day is not the solution to having cleaner air. The vehicles which couldn’t pass through the road on Sundays would pollute the air elsewhere in the city. It is like transferring the polluted air from one area so other people could breathe it elsewhere. The point should be to clean the air, not having a cosmetic and simplistic solution to the problem.

On a lighter vein, health conscious visitors and residents can take heart that during these rainy days, air quality in the city’s central business district area is improving. Engineer Paquito
Moreno, regional director of the Environmental Management Bureau in the Cordillera told the media that based on daily output of automatic ambient air quality monitoring machine stationed at the foot of Session Road, air pollutants, particularly sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide ozone and particulate matters, only increase during peak hours of the day due to increasing number of vehicles passing through the city’s central business district area.

Baguio is one among the four cities in the country which has been a recipient of the machine. The other urban areas provided the state-of-the-art equipment were Davao City, Cebu City and the National Capital Region.

According to Moreno, the city’s air quality improves during the rainy season since rain washes down suspended particulates in the air. Of course, when the dry season comes, expect increased air pollution.

The equipment, he added, has not yet registered 150 micrograms per cubic meter of total suspended particulates in the city which is considered as the emergency level, thus, the city’s air quality is considered to be at the category of good to fair.

Moreno said the recorded air quality in the central business district area does not represent the air quality in other parts of the city because the air quality in less polluted areas of the city are far better than that of the central business district area.

The operation of air quality monitoring results for over a year, he said, has produced good results in terms of awareness of local government officials and residents on how to reduce pollution.

But like we said, implementation of traffic re-routing schemes to lessen the volume of vehicles at the central business district did not lessen air pollution in the city but only distributed it. So enough with this “car-less Sundays” and Your Honors, please hold a public hearing on solving the traffic mess and in lessening pollution in the city – including of course the garbage mess.
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This article below reached my email. Maybe, this could shed some light on what is happening at the Olympics and what went wrong with the Philippine sports program:

It is quite a puzzle why a country of approaching 90 million people could not produce a gold medal in the Olympics. Still, it remains quite a puzzle why, for almost 100 years of Olympic participation, the Philippines could not even dominate a single sport.

At the ongoing Beijing Olympics, the Philippines seems to be heading for another medal shutout. Halfway through the Games, the country has yet to win a single round in any event that it participated in its march toward the elusive gold.

Its best bet for the gold, Harry Tañamor, did not even reach first base, bowing to Ghanaian Mangyo Plange in the elimination round of boxing's flyweight division. It was a stunning upset since Tañamor was being tipped by the prestigious Sports Illustrated to win the silver in his weight class.

Now, with the remaining Filipino athletes facing uphill battle against the world's best, it may just be another unfortunate exit for the country. This is not to demean the capability of remaining athletes to pull off a golden miracle. But at a rate things are going, they indeed need a miracle to put the Philippines on the medal list.

Many would wonder what went wrong with the Philippine sports. The country has been participating in the Olympics since 1924 but has never had the golden opportunity to win the gold.

The closest the country has the opportunity to bag the gold was when Anthony Villanueva and Mansueto Velasco fought in boxing finals. Both lost in controversial fashion. But those were many Olympics ago and the Philippines never had the chance to recover from those frustrating and demoralizing defeats.

Now in the aftermath of this another dismal performance by the country's athletes, another finger-pointing scenario on who's to blame is expected to arise between its sports officials. It has been the name of the game that whenever Filipino athletes suffer setback in their campaign overseas, bickerins would normally erupt between the country's sports officials.

What the country needs is a concrete long-term program that should start at the grassroots level. There are countless talents from across the country that, if given proper training and government support, can give the best in the world a run for their money.

The government is not short on funds for this ambitious program, as seen in the hundreds of millions of pesos that it infused into various sporting programs. But only a concerted effort from among sports agencies can the Philippines be on the right path towards the Olympic gold.