On December 20, the Epulu bridge was officially reopened by the governor of Oriental Province. It took only 26 days for the Office des Routes to fix the bridge, which is record time considering the case of the nearby Komanda bridge. That bridge took more than 2 years to fix, presumably because it was more than 4 times as long, other possible routes were available, and more than 500 people had work, and several corrupt officials directly benefited from the costs of transporting vehicles across the river.
Let's hope that 2010 will mark an incident-free year for bridges, so that I don't have to make a predictive model of how long they'll take to fix, because that wouldn't be interesting all.
Variables include:
X = Other Routes possibly be taken
Y = Merchandise tonnage
Z = (number of people who benefit * 5) - number of people who suffer
ZZ = number of corrupt officials who benefit
Not interesting....
The fast action can be attributed to political will behind fixing this bridge because National Route 4 connects Orientale Province and there were no practical options for goods transport but to continue crossing at the broken bridge site. Thus, transporters had to pay officials for the right to offload goods, villagers to actually offload their goods, spend a night or two in town, and have another vehicle waiting on the other side of the bridge. The effect of the bridge being out was increased prices of beer from Kisangani's Primus factory moving east to population centers like Beni, Bunia, and Butembo, while it also increased the price of food (beans, corn, and potatoes) and cheap Asian manufactured goods (tvs, stereos, flashlights, batteries) going west to Kisangani and even Kinshasa more than 1000 mi away.
So Epulu is a little bit deforested near the river but not too much the worse for wear. Many villagers were able to make some cash out of this whole disaster. How can this be prevented from happening again? It will take basic law enforcement, which is hardly easy in this country where most people live on less than dollar a day.
