The PHP 107-billion soil test

Somewhere between the feasibility study and the final design, the Panay-Guimaras-Negros bridge found 80 meters of missing seabed and PHP 107.59 billion in new costs.

The polite explanation came at Infrastructure Forum 2026 in Iloilo City. Project manager Antonio Erwin Aranaz said the feasibility study assumed foundation piles of about 70 meters. The final engineering design found nothing solid until 150 meters in parts of the Iloilo Strait. “We haven’t been able to get a hard rock,” he said. So the piles went deeper, the girders shifted from prestressed concrete to lighter steel, and the estimate submitted to the National Economic and Development Authority rose from PHP 224 billion to PHP 331.59 billion. Aranaz’s own section figures — PHP 108 billion for Section A, PHP 267 billion for Section B — add up to PHP 375 billion. DPWH has not explained the PHP 43-billion difference. It should, and soon.

To be fair to the engineers, soft marine soil is not a scandal. Ignoring it would be. A 33-kilometer sea crossing built on optimistic borings is how governments end up owning ruins. If the choice is an honest PHP 331 billion or a cheaper bridge resting on assumptions the soil has already refuted, take the honest one. The redesign is a point in DPWH’s favor, not against it.

But candor about geology earns no exemption from candor about money. The study that missed the seabed by 80 meters was prepared, paid for, and approved by somebody. The public deserves to know who, at what cost, and whether anyone independently vetted the geotechnical work before the project was packaged for Korean financing. NEDA could make deep subsurface investigation a precondition for approving any mega-bridge. That reform would cost a rounding error of PHP 107 billion.

The money is patient, not imaginary. The USD 56.6 million Korean loan that funded the engineering carries zero interest, a 0.1 percent service charge, and 40 years to pay, 10 of them grace. Generous terms — but still debt, still repaid by Filipinos who were told in October 2024 at the exchange of financing agreements in Malacañang that the project cost PHP 187.54 billion. The economic case was computed at PHP 224 billion. Nobody has published the arithmetic at PHP 331 billion. And nobody has said whether crossing will be free. The pump boat from Ortiz wharf to Jordan costs about PHP 35. Cebu’s CCLEX opened at PHP 90 per car and has raised tolls since. A toll rate chasing PHP 331 billion could leave the boatmen busier than DPWH expects.

Those boatmen deserve better than accidental survival. When the crossing drops from 40 minutes to 10, ferry crews, porters, and wharf vendors lose livelihoods that no slide at the forum bothered to count. A transition program — retraining, priority hiring on the construction itself, wharf conversion plans with the LGUs — should be drafted in 2026, not discovered as a problem in 2033.

Yes, build the bridge. But Western Visayas has waited since 1999, when JICA first studied these crossings. It can handle a straight answer about what the wait now costs.