Submitted by Vox Bikol on
NAGA CITY – As the 9-day religious festivity of the Lady of Peñafrancia was concluded on Sunday (Sept. 18), families of the victims of the 1972 “Colgante Bridge Tragedy” publicly lamented that all these years no memorial services have been held to remember the 134 victims, who died when the Colgante bridge collapsed during the fluvial procession in the afternoon of September 16, 1972, 5 days before the late Philippine strong-man, President Ferdinand E. Marcos declared Martial Law.
Kin of the victims have remarked that the current generation has forgotten the tragic incident that happened 39 years ago
A concerned group belonging to the Camarines Sur Bankers Club led by Bryonjose Barrameda likes to remember the victims of the tragedy. It is not clear yet how.
Barrameda said that for a start, the Bankers Club is compiling the list of all 134 persons who died in the accident based on records from the Naga City Government and the Regional Trial Court Branch 20 in preparation for the 40th year commemoration of the “Colgante Tragedy” to be held during the Peñafrancia celebration in 2012.
Records show that most of the 134 victims were already indemnified by the City government following legal proceedings conducted at the Regional Trial Court.
But reportedly the stigma of the tragedy remained in the minds of past local officials who were blamed for negligence for allowing crowds of people to view the procession at the unstable wooden bridge the structure of which dated back to the late 1940s.
The people who died from the Colgante incident included two radio reporters.
As the “Pagoda” of the Lady of Peñafrancia was about to pass the bridge, the then wooden bridge broke and the victims fell into the Naga river and crushed by the bridge structure. Others victims died from electrocution after the power wires installed at a post near the bridge got immersed in the river.
Although the bridge was immediately rebuilt in 1973, crowds were kept-away from the bridge during Peñafrancia fluvial processions in the succeding years. (SONNY SALES)