A local contractor who took pains in seeking accreditation from the Department of Public Works and Highways to have his concrete batching plant accredited is crying foul arising from the practice of his counterparts to circumvent the new construction requirement. t was presumed that two other owners of accredited batching plants have felt the same way. It used to be that any Tom, Dick and Harry who engaged in road projects can practice with his construction business using the primitive way of mixing concrete with other building aggregates. Not anymore with the new DPWH accreditation process as mandated in a recent memorandum circular. Under the new guidelines, road construction can be undertaken if the contractor owns a batching plant using the latest mixing technology using the weight measure instead of the usual volumetric mixture.

Under the present set up, contractors who have no accredited batching plants just ask certification from any facility authorized by the DPWH as having used the computerized technology. The same is true with asphalt. Under the same guidelines, asphalt batching plants should also be computerized just like its concrete counterpart. With the certification from the accredited batching plant, the truant contractor will engage in his usual “merry ways” of using the crude way of mixing cement with sand and gravel known in construction parlance as volumetric mixture.

The computerized technology in batching concrete was the DPWH way of checking the correct mixture as against the usual short changing process undertaken by fly-by-night contractors. This was the lament of Vinzon Te, plant manager of P. Te Construction, one of the three accredited batching plants in this part of Bohol. He said contractors who engage in sub-standard mixture of concrete as always resulted in cracks of their projects as soon as they were finished. Te apparently knew whereof he spoke. In some instances, several Bohol road projects suffered spider-like cracks as a result of sub-standard concrete mixture. (With reports from Sen Guingguing)