Mind your Ps

READ THIS in Headline Gitnang Luzon, September 11, 2013 issue online. Underscoring/highlighting mine:  

CLARK FREEPORT – Vice Gov. Dennis “Delta” Pineda and at least nine others will travel to Taiwan this month to inspect Polyvinyl chloride (PVC) sheet files as part of the efforts of the Pampanga government to solve perennial flooding, a member of the provincial board disclosed over the weekend.

Senior Board Member Ferdinand Labung, who will join the delegation, said they will study the “viability and efficiency” of the PVC sheet files extensively used in rivers, creeks and other bodies of water in China and Taiwan, also known as Chinese-Taipei.

Labung said the Taiwan-made materials are used to prevent water from spilling out of rivers and onto properties and roads. He added that these are being eyed to replace the sheet files made of cement and steel.
Labung said that the sheet files made of PVC are reportedly “light weight,” allowing for “quick transfers and installations” of the materials.

“The PVC sheet files are also more durable and live longer than the ones we use made of steel and cement,” said Labung, who added that Gov. Lilia Pineda “wants to make sure of its effectiveness before she gives a go to the use of PVC sheet files.”

Earlier, Guagua Mayor Dante Torres appealed to the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) to make immediate and permanent actions on the breached portions of a dike in Barangay San Jose. It caused flooding in at least four other villages, including Barangays San Matias and Santo Cristo, at the height of monsoon rains last month.

Torres said that the Diosdado P. Macapagal Memorial Hospital (DPMMH), Pampanga’s provincial hospital, is prone to floods if the dike will not be repaired.

Labung has yet to give the name of the company in Taiwan, which reportedly offered to shoulder the expenses for the travel of their group. ● Joey Pavia

No typo error in the above, owing to the consistency in the usage of sheet files – a total of six times.

Kafamfangan taken to the extreme there, reducing to ridiculous proportions an otherwise good news story. And giving it a totally different meaning.

So is the search for solution to the perennial inundation of Pampanga now centering on the piling of documents along riverbanks, creeks and dikes to prevent their erosion or overtopping? That’s what sheet files conjure in the mind. At least in mine.

Must be really strong documents there to try to outdo even King Canute himself. (For those not in the know, he was that king of England, Denmark, Norway and parts of Sweden who was so great a ruler that his courtiers claimed he could command the tides of the sea to go back. So he had his throne carried to the seashore and sat on it as the tide came in, commanding the waves to go back to open sea. Of course, he got all wet.) 

It boggles the mind – mine – to think how the Honorable Ferdinand “Dinan” Labung, an engineer who built his name, his fortune and his politics, around his highest rated construction business, can ever take sheet files for sheet piles, those “made of timber, steel, or prestressed concrete set close together to resist lateral pressure, as from earth or water.” 

Aye, it could only be his Kafamfangan? Heard and written to perfection by the ace reporter Joey Pavia, a stickler for accuracy, accuracy, accuracy as impacted in him by his late, dearly lamented father, the illustrious editor Joe L. Pavia

Or Labung could really be talking of a new engineering system. Consider this direct quote from him: “The PVC sheet files are also more durable and live longer than the ones we use made of steel and cement.”

Live longer. Wow, with lives of their own, the sheet files can grow to maturity, procreate and multiply to further buttress the banks wherever they are piled.

Yeah, the perfect solution to Pampanga’s flooding there.

I am just wondering why “Labung has yet to give the name of the company in Taiwan, which reportedly offered to shoulder the expenses for the travel of their group.”  

Trade secret to protect the patent for sheet files as the new engineering miracle?

So excited am I to see these sheet files that I want to join Labung’s delegation to Taiwan, at my own expense. It is not everyday that one sees a new creation.