Last March 3, a 22-wheeler trailer truck spun out of control and hit the island in front of Miriam College on Katipunan Avenue in Quezon City at 2:58 a.m., spilling its load of tons of sacks of chicken-feed additives and causing unusually heavy traffic up to around 10 a.m.
According to reports, nobody was killed or injured in the mishap. But we won’t ever know how many plans were abandoned because of, and how many work hours were lost to, traffic. We also wouldn’t know if the truck driver was kept on the job or summarily dismissed.
Every time these road accidents happen, one thing is clear to me: In both big and tiny ways, life is never the same again.
Unforgettable
It has been 15 months since a 10-wheeler wing van truck carrying sacks of sugar bulldozed five cars, a bus, a utility van, and over a dozen motorcycles at the descent of the Katipunan flyover, northbound; five people were killed and over 30 were injured, and traffic was put at a standstill for over six hours.
I will never forget that day, Dec. 5, 2024, a Thursday. It happened to be my and my wife’s fourth jowa anniversary, also my best friend Red and his wife Aie’s ninth jowa anniversary, and, from that point on, the day of Aie’s accident on Katipunan. Life has never been the same since then.
On the night of that day, Red was driving to his company’s Christmas party in Rizal. Aie had just finished holding a one-on-one violin tutorial session with a client in Blue Ridge.
Aie was a music major, and she used to switch roles as Violin II and I in two of the University of the Philippines’ orchestras. Done with college and working to help make ends meet, she gave violin lessons to children. She also holds a degree in physical education and was a lecturer at the UP College of Human Kinetics. Just the weekend prior to the accident, we, her “orgmates” at the UP Mountaineers, assisted in her practical exam for PE students: a 40-kilometer bike ride around Metro Manila.
That Thursday night, Aie arranged for a motorcycle ride via an app—and became involved in the accident. A motorcyclist whose name we never found out called Red on his phone while rescuers brought Aie to Quirino Memorial Medical Center (QMMC). Witnesses said she was pulled out of the heap of fallen motorcycles shaped like a narrow letter “C,” her body folded around her hip, with her feet almost touching her face.
Aie was fully conscious the entire time she was awaiting rescue, her head shielded by the standard-issue helmet. Frantic and running on adrenaline when the rescuers recovered her, she was still able to retrieve Red’s phone number from memory and dictate it to the helpful motorcyclist who broke the news to him. Much later, she recounted to us how she kept shouting for help beneath the motorcycles; how the heat of the engines, so close to her face and her body, burned; and how the smell of fumes and spilled oil and gasoline choked her. It took rescuers roughly 45 minutes to pull her out.
U-turn
Red made a U-turn as he approached Binangonan and made his way to QMMC lost in his thoughts, cold, shaking, and horrified by all the possible worst-case scenarios. He and Aie have three children together and two are still little boys.
Within the hour of his arrival at QMMC, while my wife and I were in the middle of our anniversary dinner, Red brought me onboard. He requested that I check the news, and asked if there was any way my two doctor-siblings could help because the hospital was cramped and hard put to deal with other victims of the catastrophe on Katipunan.
I am recounting these details not only to paint the gory picture but also to present to the reader the accident’s anatomy. It seems that, in past decades, we’ve learned to absorb accidents as one-off things: instantaneous, finished the moment they happened, and happening only to a few individuals except ourselves because the Supreme Being meant it to be so. But this couldn’t be any farther from the truth of how these accidents figure in our lives. (And how cruel it must be to keep failing to see how the Lord is kind.)
Aie is alive despite grave injuries to her spine. As of this writing, she has undergone nine surgeries to fix her fractured right arm and her fractured left forearm; to bring sensation and control back to her legs and feet; and to allow her to regain some control of her bladder and bowels, to press her fingers down and to release, and to battle a serious infection. She was confined at two hospitals for over a month after the accident, and was confined three more times in the months that followed. She is dutifully working with her doctors and physical therapists and is scheduled to go under the knife soon for a tenth time for further treatment on a forearm.
My older brother is one of the attending orthopedic surgeons, and the communities to which Red, Aie, and I belong have been keeping their family company.
Each one of the turns in Aie’s health go beyond the interest of news outlets and their consumers and beyond any of our thresholds for pain. And I have found it impossible not to think about how we often accept all of these just because “the brakes failed,” or “the driver fell asleep,” or “it was an accident.”
CCTV footage
In the past years, there has been a proliferation of news centering on CCTV footage of traffic accidents and street crimes. News programs on TV have given the footage names (such as “NahuliCAM!” or “Bayan Patroller”) and we’ve learned to trust these clips as the absolute authority in truth-telling, very much like how Foucault and other theorists conceptualized the panopticon. It has become synonymous to “proof” and “evidence” and, therefore, necessary for ascribing guilt or solving crime and other problems.
A close relative of the CCTV footage is dashcam footage, whose evolution I would trace to American TV shows of the “wildest police chases” in the ’90s, now also mass-produced via social media pages. But what has transpired with the democratization of information via social media is how we, the viewers/consumers, have learned to act simultaneously as the witnesses, experts, and judges to these everyday disorders. This, for me, hammers the nail into the coffin of our attitudes toward accidents. On all fronts, we’ve been desensitized to, and to some level entertained by, videos of accidents, so that we have learned to just drive past them and to find no one accountable.
There was only one CCTV footage of the accident that happened on Katipunan on Dec. 5, 2024. The victims promptly requested this footage from the Metro Manila Development Authority (MMDA), but that agency’s processes are long and winding, and as far as we know, access has been denied. TV Patrol aired five seconds of footage from the MMDA the day after the accident and most of it was a blur of lights with no discernible plate number or vehicle make and model. More than being just unfortunate, this case has been buried in layers of everything, being “just an accident.”
At this point, it’s hard to believe that these life-changing and indeed life-ending events are still called mere “accidents.” This view of accidents as isolated moments has resulted in piecemeal and slapdash responses: promissory notes, brief relief, donations, etc. We rarely ever seek justice for the victims, long-term and innovative solutions, or even better engineered roads. We don’t see how the structures that have been deliberately put in place lend so much room for “accidents.”
Justice
Some of the victims of that disaster have broken free of the view that justice has been served with the (brief) imprisonment of the truck driver—a blue-collar worker likely living on minimum wage who was bailed out by his company’s lawyers—and the pittances some of them eventually received. They are now looking into the truck’s maintenance records and why the company—a sugar giant—was pushing it to run that day. And in each of these functions, indeed, our laws and our government played no small part.
Almost a year after the fact, many of the victims remained untreated in the hospitals they were brought to. Whatever damage the crash inflicted on their bodies would remain largely permanent.
At times, Red is misled into thinking that they are to blame: Had we been elsewhere at that time, this would not have happened. Occasionally, he feels that the world has closed in on him and Aie. On Friday nights, almost regularly for the past 64 weeks, we talk over beer in their house, and we try our best to remind each other that we are where we are because we are.
Their two sons have developed an acute understanding of their mother’s plight, and they still sometimes wish she would be able to walk and run and play with them again, and not be stuck on a wheelchair most of the time. Aie, from being a capable PE teacher and violinist, is adjusting to a Metro Manila that is heedless of the lives of persons with disabilities. Ira, their eldest child, readily assists her. Ultimately, this is what we censor when we keep calling accidents only accidents: that this is the world we built and there are no such things as accidents. CS
