Built against the odds
Delayed by some the years by the change in presidency and by stern opposition by the NEDA’s Romy Neri, Colayco lost no time in pushing for the extension of the SCTEx into the TPLEx as far as Rosario, La Union. For this, he even got better terms from the JICA at 0.50% per annum.
It was not until 2005 when the SCTEx started construction, not long after
chairman in 2004. The SCTEx was to be a feather in cap of the GMA administration, by now battered by allegations of un- follow-up, the next star in the pantheon of development assistance loans, the lender reserved the right to choose the contractor and the speci-
between Kajima, Obayashi, JFE Engineering and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries contracted the Subic- Clark segment and Hazama,Taisei and Nippon Steel were for the Clark-Tarlac segment. Project consultants were a joint venture between Oriental Consultant, Katahira & Engineering International and Nippon Koei Co. Ltd. The longest expressway in the country was about to become a reality.
As a gigantic infrastructure undertaking, the SCTEx suffered from sniping from an unusually large gallery of naysayers and
complaining about compensation for land - ernment units who wanted an entry/exit to their town or didn’t want the highway to barrel through. Costs were climbing as the mountainous terrain between Subic and Clark, courtesy of the Pinatubo eruption, needed extensive civil works solutions — viaducts over gullies slicing through mountains (instead of tunneling), shotcreting or the installation of gabion slope protection and curving the route to provide scenic vistas. Ditto for the soft foundation rice land/ sugar land spanning the whole of the Tarlac portion that was generally arrow straight.
The loudest oppositors were the big local construction conglomerates. It was already tough enough that only the donor organization (JICA) could choose contractors but the said Japanese contractors also joint-ventured with virtual unknowns, at least to the eyes and minds of the Philip- Japanese contractors chose to go with second- tier outfits prompted wagging tongues and whispering, rather loudly and indiscriminately, that corruption was rife and that their alleged lower prices vis-a-vis the better-known contractors were equivalent to shoddy build quality. Nevertheless, by 2008, nine years after inception and three years after construction commenced, the GMA administration was able to open
- augurations from the second to the third quarter, with a good number of exits still