Beware of falling Billboards

Maswood Alam Khan

Since the day I took charge of my office in Khulna the scene that had been curdling my blood was a huge unipole billboard (hoarding signboard on a single pole made of wide metallic pipes) erected about 40 feet high on the 3 feet wide mid-island of Khan A. Sabur Road, just at the southern corner of our office premises.
   My heart throbbed heavily when one windy day I found the structure swaying like a tall coconut tree at the slight blows of wind. Immediately I advised my office to bring the precarious position of the billboard to the notice of the local authority of the advertising bank who, as they informed us over telephone, warned the concerned advertisement agency responsible for the structure and urged them to take corrective measures. Five months passed by; but, no correction was made to stop the unipole billboard from tilting with winds blowing.
   I took a photograph of the unipole billboard as I had a hunch the billboard might fall any day, any moment and the photograph may one day give me a feeling of snapping the twin towers of World Trade Centre in New York City before their collapse.
   The printed message on the ‘30 feet by 15 feet’ plastic-like panaflex sheets wrapping both sides of the uppermost angle-barred frames atop the unipole structure was serene: “EBL Jibandhara Loan” with a footnote “Life-er shob isshh vanish” (A consumer loan from EBL can make all your frustrations of unfulfilled wishes melt away).
   The young girl, on the advertisement, with her fingers pointing upward suggesting—-as is expressed in sign language—-‘anxieties vanished’ and her measured smile of contentment gave a welcome tone to any passer by who would look at the colossal billboard erected at the busiest crossroads of Khulna town. The advertisement with the witty message and the still picture of a cute damsel used to beguile me whenever I looked out through the window of my chamber on the second floor of our office as it perhaps did bemuse many young and old perambulators who walked down the sidewalks or crossed the streets. Many accidents took place at this busy juncture of six roads and maybe many of the victims met accidents while gaping at the captivating face of the girl on the billboard, unaware of onrushing traffics. A young worker fell to an instant death last year in an early morning while he was stretching the panaflex sheets on the frames of this billboard.
   Last Thursday around midnight as stormy wind of Cyclone Sidr with a velocity of 240 kilometer an hour was lashing the nonporous panaflex sheet—-a solid space of 450 square feet with no holes for winds to pass through—-the unipole billboard swayed vigorously for the last time before falling down on the road with a big roaring thunder. Luckily, there was no human casualty as the road remained almost deserted since evening for fear of impending cyclone. A few more unipole billboards had to kiss ground on the same night.
   Many such unipole billboards erected by roads and highways and hoardings on rooftops of high-rise buildings in Dhaka metropolis were also felled by the cyclone Sidr on the same fateful night blaring a nightmarish message that a passer by or a motorist has to mind seriously his/her step or passage while passing by a towering billboard or a hoarding hanging overhead. Collapsing of hoardings and billboards reminds us of ‘a bolt that fell from the blue’ a few years back when an engineer while riding in his jeep suddenly died near the science laboratory in Dhaka when an over-bridge collapsed on his jeep killing him on the spot.
   An experienced structural engineer told me that many such sky-scraping billboards, which are still standing erect, would have to collapse very soon at a slight push of a mild breeze because the Sidr wind has already weakened or cracked the basement on which they are now somehow standing—-the way a tree with its trunk sawed halfway through falls by a slight pull by a rope.
   The billboard advertising ‘EBL’s Jibadhara Loan’ in front of our office is one of 15 such unipole billboards in Khulna city alone and maybe of not less than 1000 all over Bangladesh that were erected during the last few years as the best cash cows an advertisement agency can ever dream of. Each billboard earns the advertisement agency yearly revenue of Taka one million and entails numerous monetary transactions between work-undertaking and work-giving agencies both over and under the tables.
   Concerned city corporations and municipal authorities approve of erections of these billboards, earn yearly rental of Taka 18 per square foot in addition to Taka 60,000 as initial fees for each billboard, and are responsible for checking their structural designs and public safety. But, these unipole billboards seem to have entered public happiness as the sword of Damocles—-a shining sword fastened from the ceiling by a horse-hair that was hanging above the head of Damocles, a sycophantic courtier of tyrant Dionysius II of Syracuse, to prove that ‘happiness is fragile’.
   According to my engineer friend, the solid basement for such a unipole billboard should be 10 feet wide, 10 feed long and 20 feet deep of proper reinforcement with genuine steel rods, cement and stone chips. In addition, the tower must not be erected before the basement is properly cured by water and the long single pole with an attached ladder and multiple joints has to be of proper width, gauge and appropriate metallurgical qualities.
   Nevertheless, the billboard near our office that fell on Thursday night was erected on a basement of 3 feet by 3 feet (to fit in 3 feet wide mid-island of Khan A. Sabur Road) and as I came to know from a local resident, the contractor who erected the tower could not wait for days for curing the basement with water and had to hoist the billboard soon after the masonry job.
   To quicken the reinforcement concretes were hurriedly blended with excessive cement, another suicidal procedure to make the basement brittle and easily crack-able—-perhaps the raison d’être for which the billboard used to sway to cuddle my blood. The old and rusted MS pipes that were jointed and painted to hoist the billboard tower were reportedly of the worst quality: the pipes that are usually rejected as junks due to iron fatigue. If all the existing and future unipole billboards all over the country are and are to be of the same structural quality, I am afraid, we may have to break the present emergency rule to call a public meeting in Purana Paltan to raise our voices in chorus against the advertisement agencies responsible.
   Blinking neon signs, colourful billboards, bright sodium-lights etc. exude a metropolitan warmth, flavour and vibrancy. Rural people who are a little bored with their tranquil environment feel enamoured as they jaunt to their nearby cities and meander around the downtowns on the walkways lined by high-rise office buildings and traditional shop-houses embellished with sparkling signboards and billboards to relieve their monotony of rustic life. True, when the signboards were few and far between.
   Like many sprawling cities in the world, Dhaka, with our other smaller cities and towns mimicking her, is poised to be completely buried by advertisement jungles. Once a slick city famous for her architectural beauty Dhaka has already lost her individual identity with mushrooms of hoardings and graffiti ruthlessly drowning her historical buildings with ornate spangles. Visual pollution is suffocating who are now living in this metropolis.
   Advertisement is a very strong medium to motivate consumers to buy the advertisers’ products and services. An advertisement, especially one on a billboard, is designed with a few words in large prints and a humorous or arresting image in brilliant colour readable in a very short time to catch a person’s attention and create a memorable impression, leaving the reader thinking about the advertisement after s/he has driven past it. A computer driven advertisement on a billboard even reciprocates with an animated salutation when a passer by waves at it.
   Such coercive drawing of attention of a driver speeding his truck or a pedestrian crossing a busy road has often distracted his vital attention that was otherwise needed for his safety on the road. Many motorists and beguiling passers by thus became victims of fatal accidents due to billboards blaring slogans in captivating words and images and showing snippets of dramas in digital pictures in multidimensional movies as the victims looked away from onrushing traffics during crucial moments while gaping at an attractive lass in her provocative posture on digital billboards. One such victim was a poor young boy who died from a road accident in Farm Gate as he was awfully staring at a movie of such an electronic billboard erected on the rooftop of Ananda cinema hall a year or two back.
   With hazards of such mental distractions has been added another peril due to probability of falling of the giant unipole billboards on heads of walking humans and running vehicles. We are already shattered with woes of floods, cyclones, adulteration, rising prices and a plethora of other direct and indirect oppressions inside and outside of our homes. We are already three-fourth dead. We beg to die lying on a bed—-which is not a huge demand.
   Before reading or viewing news of deaths under a falling billboard, may we solicit pity of the advertisement agencies to rid our cities and towns of the advertisement jungles by uprooting those billboards from places where mental distraction of road users is dangerous and by further reinforcing the bases of the billboards in other locations on the roads and highways?
   This year Mr. Gilberto Kassab, a daring man in South America, accomplished a feat that has long been deemed impossible to achieve anywhere else in the world. As mayor of the world’s fourth-largest city—-Sao Paulo of Brazil—-Mr. Kassab ordered complete ban on outdoor advertising in his city and all the billboards, hoardings, outdoor video screens and advertisements on buses in the city have already been eliminated at breakneck speed, many thanks to Clean City Law that was framed from a necessity to combat pollution….pollution of water, sound, air, and the visual. Nearly $ 8 million in fines were issued to cleanse Sao Paulo of the blight on her landscape.
   A few years back I read a story in Time magazine on sprawling gardens of thousands of coconut trees in Sri Lanka where visitors are required to wear special helmets and avoid locations of hazards while entering the gardens where notice boards with the words “Beware of falling coconuts” are prominently posted.
   If for any reason the unipole billboards cannot be uprooted or reinforced with stronger basements immediately may we appeal to the government to post beside the unipole billboards similar number of mini billboards with the words: “BEWARE OF FALLING BILLBOARDS” so that we can steer clear of death traps?

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Uncertainty, risk are handmaiden of speculation

Share Shah

Imagine yourself lying under the pepul tree by the side of a tranquil pond on a warm afternoon. Far off you can hear the cacophony of the migrant birds, the braying of the livestock, the far of cry of an occasional heavy-duty truck bound for some unknown destination, over laden with domestic goods. Often the bleating of the bus and cries of an over eager helper packing the passengers in the sardine can like orifice of the tin vehicle breaks your slumber. But soon it is quite again and you go back to your intoxicating nap.
   But then again a new sound wakes you up. You hear a plunk and look toward the source of the sound. You eyes alight towards the centre of the pond and you see the rhythm of small waves gyrating from the epicentre and spreading all over the pond. There is no longer any noise but you hear and feel the ripples of the waves spreading and spreading, trying disparately to reach the banks of the pond. Forcing its way and trying to bring in some new message through the undulations of the waves. Waves after waves crash into the banks of the pond and soon afterwards they are no waves anymore. You know that someone threw a pebble into the pond. You remember your own youth and the pebbles you threw into the pond. You recall especially looking for flat pieces of stones, which would jump over and over again across the pond, skidding and barely touching the surface of the water. You would win, if your stone crossed the pond without sinking in the waters.
   But you cannot forget the mesmerizing effect of throwing stones in the pond. The circular flows and motion of the circumference becoming bigger and bigger holding you in a hypnotic trance. Your eyes remain riveted to the soundless motion on the surface of the pond till it is dissipated once again to placidity. But when yet another stone is thrown into the pond the ripples crash with each other. When more stones are flung, the waves fight with each other and there is no harmony any longer, there is only chaos and disorder.
   Both facts and rumours are like stones in the pond. They make waves. They have a ripple effect, which influences the tranquillity of the environment. Such facts, real or imaginary also greatly influence the stock market. More so because uncertainty and risk are the handmaiden of speculation. Any information has to be evaluated into the far-reaching consequences but often the average person does not have the capacity or the education to really measure the impact of new information. The fact is that such ability is hardly required in the traders in the speculative market. The desirable quality is that he reacts and is able to get in or out fast enough. So the real factor is his agility and not his intellect.
   
   Credit restriction by SEC
   One such stone was timely cast last week by the Securities & Exchange Commission in the form of restriction of credit to customers. Surely this could be a much needed respite to the unbridled ride we are seeing in the stock market. There is little doubt that most of the scrips have crossed over the threshold of fundamental value. Speculation and high easy finance has been the motive power to drive the runaway market. There was little thought on the overall economy and the hard times we may have to face. Like mannequins the traders bought and sold shares in a senseless game out of some diabolical plot. They never checked or tried to understand what was going to happen. If there was a buying trend they bought. If many sold they sold. By the end of the day they squared their positions and worked out the profit of the loss. When you throw a stone in the pond you must not forget that the waves also move all things that float on it. The plants and the deadwood also start swinging in the tintinnabulation of soundless rhythm. No different from when one child cries all children start crying. When you spook one cow the whole heard gets spooked. It goes both ways either exuberance or panic.
   One would have expected that the institutional reforms and release of new memberships in the main exchange would bring in fresh blood and a new approach towards professionalism. Unfortunately all we see is more institutional greed and the desire for a quick buck. The banks have forgotten the fact that savings through roping in equity should not be mixed with debt. But our new institutional brokers have discovered that this could be an easy and safe way for lending money. Little do they release that when things get bad they may get worst and there is little time left to get back the basic investment.

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