Flood Waters in Bangkok Shut Domestic Airport

Thais waded through flood waters in Bangkok on Tuesday. (Sakchai Lalit/Associated Press)

October 25, 2011
By SETH MYDANS
The New York Times

BANGKOK — Floodwaters surged further into Bangkok on Tuesday, forcing the closure of an airport and driving hundreds of people to flee the rising water in one of the region’s worst flood seasons in decades.

Unusually heavy flooding and typhoons have taken the lives of nearly 800 people and affected more than eight million in an arc that stretches across Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and the Philippines, according to a tally by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

Another 100 people were said to have died in Myanmar, where reports are difficult to verify.

As the threat to Bangkok grew, Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra declared a five-day holiday to allow residents to devote themselves to coping with the flood.

Efforts to protect the city’s former international airport, Don Muang, failed as water seeped in and domestic flights were canceled on Tuesday. But officials said the new international airport, Suvarnabhumi, sits on higher ground and had not been affected.

Ms. Yingluck said rising water at the Don Muang airport would not threaten the government’s main flood-monitoring office, which is located there. High tides expected at the end of the week could worsen the flooding as they push back at runoff passing through the city.

While some water had entered seven districts that had been declared to be at risk, most of Bangkok remained dry on Tuesday. But many grocery shelves had been stripped of water and other essentials, and traffic was light as people parked their cars for safety in raised garages or on highway overpasses.

The official death toll in Thailand has risen to 366 since heavy rains and flooding began in mid-July. Some 113,000 were reported to be living in shelters and 720,000 seeking medical attention.

Thailand is one of the world’s chief exporters of crocodile products and concern spread in some flooded areas about crocodiles that had escaped their pens.

Elsewhere, Thailand’s neighbor Cambodia was struggling with its most severe floods in a decade, affecting about a tenth of the population and taking the lives of more than 200 people.

The tourist town of Siem Reap, adjacent to the ancient temples of Angkor, has been repeatedly inundated since August. Tourism has fallen sharply, shops and restaurants have been forced to close, and some hotels have had to use pumps to keep out water.

In the midst of its troubles, Cambodia, whose army has confronted Thailand in recent months in a border dispute, donated $50,000 to Thailand, and provided a similar amount to Vietnam, to help in their disaster relief efforts.

In the Philippines, where two successive typhoons took the lives of more than 100 people and left behind large-scale flooding, mudslides were reported to have severely damaged 2,000-year-old rice terraces in Ifugao province.

The operations center reported that, while water levels in provinces north of Bangkok had ceased to rise and were even beginning to decline, massive waves of additional runoff were bearing down on the capital as they flowed south toward the Gulf of Thailand.