Bangkok braced for flooding

A man carries his son whilst wading through floodwaters in Rangsit suburb of Bangkok Photo: EPA

Thailand's low-lying capital was braced for the worst last night after the government admitted it could no longer control the flood waters threatening the northern perimeters.

20 Oct 2011

By Ian MacKinnon in Sai Mai, Bangkok

The Telegraph (UK)

Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra, struggling to get a grip on the crisis, said she had asked Bangkok to open flood gates to speed the accumulated deluge through city's canals in the eastern suburbs to the sea in the Gulf of Thailand.

But the desperate strategy risked inundating seven eastern districts of Bangkok if the warren of canals that run through the capital are unable – as appears likely – to cope with the volume of flood waters that accumulated in the central plains after nearly three months of intense monsoon rain.

In Sai Mai and Bang Khen, two Bangkok districts in the front line, frantic efforts were going on to avert disaster or mitigate the worst effect of an overflow. Waters in the already swollen canals were expected rise dramatically on Friday morning.

Rough wooden homes along the banks of the major Hok Wa Canal are already almost a metre under water. Many families have left, but some were still salvaging their belongings and packing them in the back of pickup trucks, navigating planks balanced on sandbags to move between rooms.

Outside their front doors, staff from the Bangkok Metropolitan Authority and volunteers – 1,500 in one small section alone – were building a barrier three sandbags deep to a height of 2.5 metres. It had to be finished by last night to have any hope of containing the imminent deluge.

The prime minister, a political neophyte who took office just two months ago, was forced to admit that the government was being overwhelmed by the scale of the flood waters that were continuing to build just north of Bangkok and was changing tack.

"We cannot block the water forever," said a sombre Ms Yingluck. "The longer we block the water the higher it gets. We need areas that water can be drained through so [it] can flow to the sea. I have decided to ask Bangkok to open all the flood gates, which could trigger an overflow, in order to drain the water to the sea."

The announcement that the city's eastern suburbs could be sacrificed to spare inner Bangkok sparked a renewed wave of alarm among the jumpy populace, just days after Ms Yingluck said she believed the capital would probably be safe.

Residents in the city's north rushed to park their vehicles on raised expressways to save them, exacerbating the already dire congestion. Rumours about the quality of tap water sparked a run on bottled water, combined with fresh panic buying that saw supermarket shelves stripped bare.

The government has set up shelters for 45,000 people in the city of 12 million that has watched in horror as large areas of the rest of the country were inundated, costing half a million jobs and an estimated £2.1 billion in damage and lost revenue.

But in Sai Mai district, just a stone's throw from inundated Rangsit district in Pathum Thani province to the north, people and companies were fighting their own individual battles.

Businesses had built new breeze-block and concrete walls, or piled sandbags up to a metre high, at the entrances to shops and houses for kilometre after kilometre. Some local government offices used mechanical diggers to turn gardens into dykes and trenches. It was a pattern echoed by householders expecting the waters to flow down their streets by this morning.

Thim Ondorai, 56, a science teacher whose school shut three weeks ago said: "I know it's going to be bad just from watching the television," she said.

"It makes me very sad. I can't eat. I can't sleep." Yet her neighbour Ton Pam, 43, a mother-of-three taking time off from her bank job, was not convinced the failure was totally down to the prime minster, as critics say.

"The government is trying its best to stop the water. As for Yingluck, I think it's 50-50 – not good, not bad." Toey Wallaporn, 58, was calm as she expected the worst. "I'll move my belongings upstairs in my house, but I haven't done it yet. I'll wait until I know the water's coming."