BAGUIO CITY?Organizers had promised an improved ?snow show? for Saturday and Sunday to redeem themselves after the event on Dec. 4 that proved to be a big letdown.

But no show greeted some 1,000 people, mostly children accompanied by their parents, who turned up on Saturday night to watch a simulated snow falling from a mall?s rooftop on Session Road.

Parents sat their children on the street?s center island and sidewalk and waited for two hours for the show to begin. Many children spent the time playing, not minding the passing vehicles.

The city government closed Session Road on Dec. 4 and 5 for the pilot staging of the ?snow show,? drawing over 50,000 on the first night. But when people started criticizing the show online for generating streams of soap suds, city officials canceled the contract.

Councilor Elmer Datuin, the official who organized the event, told reporters that he would proceed with the remaining 16 shows, but he had not alerted the public that he had rescheduled them.

Policemen patrolling on Saturday night said the ?snow show? organizers did not coordinate with them this weekend. They, however, did not discourage people from crowding the stretch of Session Road fronting the Porta Vaga shopping mall, where the first two shows were staged.

City officials met to help Datuin work out ways of improving the event.

?Only three machines functioned [on the trial run last week]. Not all of the seven machines arrived, and we are securing all of them so we can improve the show,? City Administrator Carlos Canilao said on Tuesday.

Probe

Officially, however, the city council is launching an investigation because the bad press surrounding the Dec. 4 show may have weighed heavily on Baguio?s tourist traffic for the Christmas holidays, said Vice Mayor Daniel Fariñas.

The city government was caught off-guard when people packed a 200-meter stretch of Session Road to watch a city government contractor simulate snowfall from atop the Porta Vaga mall.

For over 20 minutes, two snow machines expelled bursts of soap suds, that looked like snowfall from afar, that fell on the crowd. The machines processed bubble liquid.

Fewer people showed up for the second ?snow show? on Sunday, which was lengthened to an hour. This time, they were secured by more policemen.

Deceived

Some of the people who watched the first two shows attacked the event online, in blogs and in the social networking site Facebook. Some said they were deceived, as they were expecting the machines to expel shaved ice or icicles.

Almost every entry criticized Datuin for allowing the crowd on Dec. 4 to grow without proper crowd-management measures in place. They demanded an inquiry from the city government.

A Facebook entry posted by Karma Chameleon said the city government should explain how it spent for the project.

But Fariñas said local officials should draw a lesson from the event.

?I told the council we must learn from this lesson. The negative feedback would definitely [impact on] our future tourism programs. I believe more careful planning should be done [before we undertake] tourism promotion [programs],? he said.

Councilor Edison Bilog sponsored the resolution initiating the probe, which seeks to establish how the project was conceived, how it was approved and how much it cost.

The P420,000 project was bid out in November, but two of the three firms that participated in the process were reportedly disqualified. The winning bidder is a snow machine supplier of SM Mall of Asia.