Whenever I go home via the expressway, I go through the Bocaue exit and pass by row upon row of firecracker stalls. The whole thing was a clusterfuck waiting to happen: Firecracker stalls side by side with other firecracker stalls, gas stations, and (I kid you not) auto repair shops and open-flame carinderias. Forget the fact that all this right beside a major highway, prone to stray sparks from vehicles and maybe the occassional cigarette butt from random motorists.
Against all probability, nothing happened. Until this morning, when I woke to the sound of explosions, and the sight of smoke against the dawn. The firecracker stalls by the Bocaue exit have been razed by fire, taking with them 8 lives and affecting close to 1,000 homes. It took one more act of stupidity on top of all this bozosity to blow up on our faces: “a buyer tested a type of firecracker called “higad” and its sparks reached a display of firecrackers …” Kinda reminds you of the gas station scene in Zoolander don’t it?
This isn’t a fortuitous event, this is something that could have been avoided with a rat brain’s worth of diligence. But there’s none of it in the factories where they kill child laborers slowly, (or through an equally moronic lack of safeguards, blow them to smithereens), none of it among municipal officials who were supposed to prevent this with proper zoning, and certainly none among the proprietors of these establishments.
And yet the firecracker industry has the temerity to bemoan how they’re being slaughtered by smuggling. In a rational democracy, that should be the least of their problems. What we have here is a classic externality problem: A wide gap exists between the private marginal costs to the firecracker industry, and the inevitable social marginal costs to everyone. Legal liability helps bridge that gap by “internalizing” such externalities, transferring the costs back to the guilty parties. But that’s assuming the system works. The laws are in place, yes. But 1) lax/no enforcement and 2) relative inaccessibility of the courts translate to no law at all.
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