The collapse of part of Triq is-Simar in Xemxija should have shaken the country. It should have dominated the national conversation. It should have triggered outrage, urgency and accountability. Instead, it risks becoming just another entry in Malta's growing catalogue of preventable construction-related failures - noted for a day, then forgotten until the next disaster.

Perhaps the fact that no one was injured softened the public reaction. Perhaps the timing, on Maundy Thursday, meant attention was elsewhere. But neither of those circumstances makes what happened any less serious. If anything, they should make us more alarmed. Malta has once again escaped tragedy by chance.

A road does not simply collapse in a functioning system. A road does not give way weeks after a wall had already collapsed at the same site if the institutions responsible are doing their job properly. When one warning sign is ignored and a second failure follows, the problem is no longer an isolated incident. It is a pattern. And patterns point to systemic rot.

This is not merely about one stretch of road in Xemxija. It is about a national model of development that too often treats risk as an inconvenience, expertise as optional, and enforcement as an afterthought. We have created a construction culture where warnings are tolerated until they become emergencies, and where action is too often reactive rather than preventive.

The remarks by Chamber of Geologists President Peter Gatt should be read not as an angry overreaction, but as an expert indictment of a broken system. His criticism is devastating because it goes to the heart of the matter: Malta's legal and regulatory framework for excavation and ground investigation is inadequate, outdated, and dangerously incomplete. If the law allows major excavation works to proceed without requiring the direct involvement of professional geologists, then the law itself is part of the hazard.

This is the scandal that should truly concern us. In a country where land is under relentless pressure, where excavation is constant, and where residential areas are routinely placed beside major construction works, scientific expertise should not be treated as a box to be ticked - or worse, bypassed entirely. Ground conditions are not uniform. Maltese geology is complex. Yet the system, we are told, relies on limited core samples and bureaucratic procedure instead of robust, specialised assessment. That is institutionalised recklessness.

And when the Building and Construction Authority is repeatedly forced to investigate after collapses, closures and failures, the public is entitled to ask a blunt question: what exactly is being regulated before things go wrong? Investigations after the fact may be necessary, but they are no substitute for prevention. Authorities cannot keep arriving after the damage is done.

A country that waits for roads to collapse before discovering its rules are inadequate is not regulating construction - it is gambling with people's lives.

That is the hard truth. Malta has not learned from its past mistakes. Not from previous collapses, not from public inquiries, not from the fear residents have repeatedly expressed, and not from the grief caused by earlier tragedies. Each time, promises are made. Each time, lessons are supposedly learned. Yet each time, another wall cracks, another building shifts, another road gives way.

The warning from Xemxija must be heeded. Not filed away. Not diluted in official statements. Not buried beneath holiday distractions. The next collapse may not spare us so lightly. And when that day comes, no authority should dare claim it was unforeseen.