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“Yes na yes,” City Administrator Wendel Avisado replied, when asked if the city registered zero casualty again.
“As usual, the Davao Medical Center was quiet. There were many doctors and nurses but no patients related to firecracker blasts,” Avisado told MindaNews.
In his Sunday television program “Gikan sa Masa, Para sa Masa” (From the Masses, For the Masses) on New Year’s Eve, Mayor Rodrigo Duterte warned those who would dare sell firecrackers and other pyrotechnic devices and those who use them will spend the New Year in jail. He also warned policemen against firing their guns.
It was the sixth year Davao City spent a “silent” Christmas and New Year following the ban on the sale of firecrackers and other pyrotechnics in 2001.
Records show that before the ban, the Davao Medical Center, Mindanao’s biggest government hospital, registered 47 firecracker-related injuries in 1998, 59 in 1999, 88 in 2000 and only two in 2001.
Several local government units in Mindanao and the rest of the Philippines have tried to follow Davao City’s example that Christmas and New Year’s revelry need not cause injuries or deaths. (MindaNews)