By Alastair Mcindoe
Philippines Correspondent
alastair@sph.com.sg

 

In Manila

FILIPINOS love to see in the New Year with a bang.

Even as I write this in my house in Manila, and it's only Tuesday afternoon, I can hear the plop of fireworks exploding in the distance.

Come nightfall on Wednesday, there will be a rising crescendo of explosions in the run-up to midnight as fireworks are let off in the streets and in organised displays, covering the city in a thick blanket of smoke for several hours.

The dark side of all this pyrotechnic merriment are the several hundred injuries caused by fireworks across the country over the New Year season.

Between Dec 21 and 29, 119 people, many of them children, were treated for fireworks injuries, a slightly lower toll than the average for the same period over the previous four years, according to the Department of Health (DOH).

The numbers, of course, rises sharply as New Year nears, and 434 cases were reported at last New Year's Eve, half the total injuries between Dec 21 2007 and Jan 5 2008. Thirty-five per cent of the injured were under 10 years of age.
As in previous years, the government has been running blood-curdling information campaigns on the perils of mishandling fireworks in various media over the past several days.

The current Health Secretary Francisco Duque is known to favour a total ban on fireworks, though it is hard see that happening.

Because of the thick smog, environmental groups are urging revellers to make a noise barrage by banging pots and pans instead. But seeing in the New Year with fireworks, as well as noisemakers, remains an unshakable Filipino tradition.

The DOH's breakdown shows that three of the top five types of fireworks causing the current crop of injuries were illegal. These garishly packaged but potentially hazardous products are sold openly in markets and roadside stalls.

An illicit backyard fireworks industry thrives in and around a handful of small towns near Manila. A heavy duty clampdown is sorely needed, but has yet to happen.

I visited one makeshift operation near Bocaue, about an hour's drive from the capital two years ago. In the corner of a field, shaded by a tarpaulin, several boys in their late teens, covered in grey dust, were packing chemicals into cardboard tubes to make rockets.

Source: REUTERS

There is a sizable above-board fireworks industry, too. But, as an editorial in The Philippine Star noted a few days ago, sales have fallen sharply in the face of foreign competition. I guess that means from China.

"The imports offer brighter and more elaborate fireworks and are safer to handle," said the paper.

Two years ago, much to the alarm of the authorities, a craze started for a bazooka-like canon made of PVC pipe called a boga. Using denatured alcohol or methylated spirits rather than gunpowder, it made an ear-splitting bang. It was swiftly banned.

One of the most popular illegal fireworks - and a major cause of injuries - is the quaint-sounding piccolo, a type of firecracker. Pla-plas, triangular envelopes of thick cardboard packed with gunpowder, make predictably thunderous bangs. And the tyre-sized Sawa, an awesome device, packs up to 5,000 rounds of explosives in its coils.

In the fiesta-like atmosphere of New Year in the Philippines, stray bullets fired by revellers - some in uniform - are another cause of injuries.

Policemen in a number of precincts in the capital have the barrels of their guns taped and initialled by senior officers a few days before New Year to make sure they don't fire off a round or two. Those that do face dismissal.

Source: AP

So come Wednesday, new year revellers in the streets will have to be mindful to dodge exploding fireworks, and heaven forbid, stray bullets too.