Former ENR editor David Rosenbaum traveled to Luzon in 2000 to report on the $1.1 billion San Roque multipurpose project, at the time the largest privately owned hydroelectric project in the world.
I was in the Philippines, on the island of Luzon, after a treacherous five-hour drive from the nearest city, Baguio, after descending into an Edenic valley of the Agno River by steep single-track lane
Agno River (Photo courtesy of David Rosenbaum)It was July 2000 and I was 45 years old, working at ENR since January 1989.
I had already traveled to many US cities to cover construction-related conventions and projects for ENR, as well as an earthquake engineering convention in Acapulco; also, he had traveled to Japan to report on the 1995 Kobe earthquake (ENR, Feb. 6, 1995, p. 10).
He was now reporting on the construction of what was then the world’s largest privately built hydroelectric project, 200 km north of Manila (ENR 19 Sep 2000, p. 30).
Socio-economic aspects virtually overshadowed the challenges encountered by Boise, Idaho-based Washington Group International Inc., which built what was then Asia’s tallest earth-and-rock dam, at 200 meters high.
For me, as a journalist, in an era before digital cameras and smartphones, my challenges included the need to take film photos of the shooting location while in an airborne helicopter without the its doors Restricted only to my death by my drop belt, I struggled to change films.
Site of the Agno River Dam (photo courtesy of David Rosenbaum) Fortunately, the contractor responsible for transporting me, John C. Lockwood, then resident manager of New York City-based Sithe Energies Inc., made my safety a priority, taking me from site to another with professional car drivers trained to evade terrorists, to an era of hijackings that led to the presence, in a McDonald’s I visited in Manila, of a guard armed with an automatic weapon.
For the contractor, challenges affecting the $1.1 billion hydro project, designed to provide 345 MW of peak power on a turnkey, fixed-price contract, included the remoteness and isolation of the site, geographically, linguistically and culturally In addition, there was the need to prioritize local customs, as when indigenous crews in one of the diversion tunnels insisted that a priest cut the throat of a sacrificial pig to ensure workplace safety.
Dam construction site. (Photo courtesy of David Rosenbaum)With a feasibility study completed in 1979 for Philippine President Ferdinand E. Marcos before he accepted exile in the US in 1986, the project was restarted in 1998, only to generate so much international criticism that critics tried to ambush the project financially through the Japan Bank. for International Cooperation, which caused some delays in payments to the contractor.
Security concerns, however, became paramount as managers struggled to facilitate communication between numerous native dialects where few residents spoke the national language of Tagalog. Managers also struggled to end the deaths in a macho local culture that sometimes viewed the heavy earth-moving equipment, with tires taller than a man, as race cars.
Workers clean construction equipment. (Photo courtesy of David Rosenbaum)The culture sometimes overwhelmed me, especially on the day of a local wedding I was invited to.
At one point, while I was outside, I felt the urge to sit alone and retreated to a fallen log in a clearing. Soon I was surrounded by children. Unlike almost all of their parents, they spoke English and asked me to help them practice their understanding of my language by telling them stories.
To this day, I remember feeling a little hopeless as I struggled to remember one story after another, and more and more stories; I remember eventually even telling them a synopsis of Moby Dick. At the reception—was it before or after my narration?—the guests insisted that I sing a song and join them in the dance.
Telling stories and singing at a local wedding was just part of the job. (Photo courtesy of David Rosenbaum) Little did I realize, while entertaining children and other guests, that I was on a personal journey that was to take me away from my previous careers in structural engineering and then engineering journalism. Two years after returning from my reporting trip to the Philippines, I left ENR in 2002 to become a high school math teacher. For the next 14 years I taught middle school, and another five years, high school. However, never during those 19 years did I think of giving my students the story of the day I accepted a plate of rice and a stewed dog.
Some years I taught in particularly tough schools where more than four out of five students qualified for free or reduced-price lunch, and few of the parents spoke English. Sometimes I felt like I was engaging in a kind of cultural imperialism, forcing algebra on immigrants whose parents lacked much more than a second- or sixth-grade education.
On some of the tougher days when I had to contradict my behavior as a pushover, I realize in retrospect that I might have growled and warned my students that I was known to eat dog. (To this day I’m still such a pushover that when my Chorkie, a Chihuahua-York mix, kisses my neck in the middle of the night, I know he wants me to lift the covers so he can get between the sheets. )
The author’s dog. (Photo courtesy of David Rosenbaum)When I look back on my trip to the Philippines and my writing of an eight-page back cover story, I find myself bewildered and a little embarrassed. Written a generation ago, it looks fine to me now on re-reading, but at the time I was quite angry about the editing of its first paragraph, thinking that some of my original lyricism was trampled upon. I realize now that I longed for a soup-to-nuts control over my work product, which I eventually achieved as a teacher, when my success on any given day in the classroom depended mostly on my own efforts, preparation, and self-control. (ENR). May 14, 2012, p. 132).
But no, teaching six classes a day of math wasn’t nearly as consequential as managing a workforce of 4,000+ at a remote dam site, even though in 19 years of teaching I probably taught at least a couple thousand children, and I can’t tell. surely now I have left behind anything of consequence either as a journalist or as a teacher.
But I hope that by example I have taught others how to take some risks that are worth it, like during my trip to the Philippines when I worked up the nerve to follow village elder Pascual W. Pocding, president of ‘a local movement of indigenous peoples (and critic of the dam) across a precarious rope bridge over a river. But will I take the risk of eating dog again? No, it was too dark, tough and playful.
(Photo courtesy of David Rosenbaum)David B. Rosenbaum
Moraga, California
February 2024
