Category: Thailand

Here’s the latest as of 4 p.m. Bangkok time today, October 20, 2011:

Summary

• Officials are now saying parts of inner Bangkok are under threat — while it had seemed a few days ago that the worst had passed.
• Prime Minster Yingluck seems increasingly to be coming under pressure as critics question the government’s methods in dealing with the floodwaters.

New maps

The BBC has this basic map today that shows which parts of Bangkok are most at risk:

The Bangkok Post today has this map and an accompanying story:

Meanwhile, this one, labeled Thailand Flood Monitoring System, provides additional information. Most of the site is in Thai, but the map is in English. Below is a screen capture:

The map is online here.

(Via @elgrodo.)

Here’s another map that seems to provide a visual representation of the parts of central Thailand and greater Bangkok that have been hit. Here’s a screen cap:

The map is online here.

(Via @seacorro)

News reports

The BBC has a good TV piece on how people are coping in hard-hit Ayutthaya. You can watch it online here.

Bloomberg reports mid-day today that:

Thailand’s government warned that floodwaters may reach parts of inner Bangkok, sending stocks and the baht lower as the government struggles to control a deluge that has inundated thousands of factories.

And there are these additional details:

The government earlier today warned residents living near Prapa canal, which runs from northern Bangkok to an area of the city near Victory Monument along an elevated train line, to be vigilant against floodwaters.

“If we can’t pump water out on time, there is a chance Bangkok may be swamped,” Pracha Promnog, head of the national flood center, said in a phone interview with Channel 3 today.

The AP reports:

Thailand’s new premier acknowledged the country’s flood crisis has overwhelmed her government, pleading for mercy from the media and solidarity from the country in battling the relentless waters.

In an emotional appearance before reporters Wednesday, Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra said her administration is doing all it can and trying to be as clear as possible about where the flooding may strike next.

The WSJ says:

Thailand’s Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra pleaded Wednesday for the country’s warring political factions to unite to combat a worsening flood crisis that now threatens to engulf parts of the capital.

Reuters says:

The threat of serious flooding in Bangkok is growing because of the volume of water running down from the centre of Thailand, and one inner city area was under threat on Thursday after floodwater breached a waterworks canal, officials said.

Pracha Promnok, justice minister and head of the government’s flood crisis centre, told Channel 3 television that city officials had been pumping water out overnight in the Samsen and Makkasan areas, which are just north of the royal palace and other sites visited by tourists.

(All emphasis mine.)

As a reminder, previous posts can be found by clicking on the Thailand flooding tag.

Stay tuned.

As ever, you can find me on Twitter: @Newley.

Here’s an update as of 11:30 a.m. today, October 19, 2011:

Tips for Tourists

I have received several emails from folks asking whether it’s still a good idea to visit to Thailand.

Obviously, I would not recommend tourists travel to central Thailand — and cities like Ayutthaya — since it’s been hard hit by flooding.

But as I’ve written here in my various Thailand flooding posts of late, central Bangkok has largely not been affected.

Other parts of the city, especially the north, have been hit by floods and are still at risk.

For other parts of Thailand, like the beaches in the south or Chiang Mai in the north, I suggest checking with the hotel or resort at which you’ll be staying. These areas have not been hit hard, but it can’t hurt to check and/or double check conditions on the ground.

So far, Bangkok’s international airport, Suvarnabhumi, has not been affected. But continue monitoring the news in case that changes.

I also suggest consulting official sources like the government’s Public Relations Department. Here is their announcement today.

And here’s is today’s statement from the Tourism Authority of Thailand.

And as always, other sources for updates include:

• Bangkok-based blogger Richard Barrow, who has been Tweeting frequent updates and posting info on his site, Thai Travel News.
• You can search Twitter using the #ThaiFloodEng hashtag for English language updates.
• I’ve previously pointed out my Bangkok journalists Twitter list. I also maintain a general Thailand list.
• You can also check out local media like The Bangkok Post, The Nation, and the official MCOT.

New Map

Today’s Nation has this map of Bangkok:

News Reports

Bloomberg reports today:

Thousands of volunteers bolstered floodwalls in Bangkok, boosting confidence among officials tasked with protecting Thailand’s capital from a surge of water that has shut factories and disrupted supply chains across Asia.

And the AP says:

Thai authorities were staging a fighting retreat Wednesday against flood waters that threaten Bangkok, after the country’s oldest factory park was completely inundated and a nearby one faced imminent threat.

Meanwhile, the WSJ has a story on Prime Minister Yingluck, the floods, and what one analyst calls a “leadership crisis”:

BANGKOK—Recriminations over the handling of Thailand’s worst floods in half a century are causing fresh setbacks for Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra as the financial cost of the disaster continues to mount and her government firmed up plans to inject billions of dollars to shore up the country’s faltering economy.

Ms. Yingluck’s biggest problem, analysts say, is the haphazard way information about the flood has been released, summed up by the science minister’s hasty call last week for evacuating part of the capital.

As ever, stay tuned.

Very briefly:

Today’s Bangkok Post has a story with a couple of new maps.

Here’s a satellite photo of Bangkok and central Thailand flooding:

And here’s a map of the industrial estates that have been affected:

Meanwhile, the WSJ says today:

Damages from Thailand’s worst flooding in decades continued to mount as parts of another industrial estate were inundated and residents worried that Bangkok remained vulnerable despite recent receding waters.

And yesterday’s NYT reported:

Fortified by dikes, runoff channels and walls of sand bags, and with workers digging and dredging around the clock, Bangkok appeared on Monday to have withstood the worst of the slow-motion tsunami that has been bearing down on it in recent days from the flooded north.

The government’s PR department has an English language update with details on tourist destinations.

The Tourism Authority of Thailand has more.

Quick note to point out an important story from Bloomberg today.

The headline is “‘Obsolete’ Thai Weather Radar Blamed for Failure to Predict Rain Severity.”

It begins:

Thailand’s weather service blamed obsolete equipment for failing to predict the severity of rains that killed 307 people, saying authorities ignored upgrade requests that could have mitigated the impact of flooding.

Requests from Thailand’s Meteorological Department for a 4 billion baht ($130 million) overhaul of its radar and modeling systems have gone unheeded since 2009, deputy director-general Somchai Baimoung said. The new equipment would allow the department to more accurately forecast seasonal rains, he said, giving dam operators information needed to adjust water levels.

“If we can get this new system, it can help people,” Somchai said in a phone interview yesterday. “No one expected rainfall would be this much. Right now our system, including hardware and software, is obsolete.”

Worth a read.

A recent BP post on Thailand’s dams is also worth checking out.

(All emphasis mine.)

(Bloomberg story via several folks on Twitter.)

Here’s the latest as of 11:45 p.m. today, October 16, 2011:

Overview

Reports suggest the worst may have passed here in central Bangkok, with no major flooding. (See news reports below.)

As I mentioned earlier, though, other parts of greater Bangkok — such as the north, west, and east — have been hit.

Ayutthaya and central Thailand have also faced major flooding.

Industrial estates in this part of the country have also been affected. (See below.)

More maps

Google Crisis Response has released an English language map. Below is a screen grab.

The map is online here.

This is a good resource, as it allows viewing different sets of data at once or individually.

Here, for example, is the a map of the parts of Thailand that have been affected by floods:

Traffy.in.th is a map that shows video from traffic Web cams. This could be useful for assessing road conditions.

Here’s what the map of Bangkok looks like. The camera icons can be clicked to see the videos.

The map is online here.

ThaiRainMap.com shows the portions of Thailand where rain is (or was recently?) falling.

Note that it’s unclear to me how this meterorological information is sourced. Here’s a screen grab:

The map is at ThaiRainMap.com.

News Reports

The AP says:

The government expressed confidence Sunday that Bangkok will escape Thailand’s worst flooding in decades, as the capital’s elaborate barriers held strong and floodwaters began receding from submerged plains to the north.

Agriculture Minister Theera Wongsamut said the largest mass of runoff water flowing southward had passed through Bangkok’s Chao Phraya river and into the Gulf of Thailand, and that the river’s levels would rise no higher. He stopped short of saying the threat to Bangkok had passed completely.

The BBC has more:

Thailand’s government has expressed confidence that the capital Bangkok will escape the worst of the country’s current flooding.

Agriculture Minister Theera Wongsamut said there were “good signs” that water levels on the city’s key Chao Phraya river would rise no higher.

The Bangkok Post reports that industrial estates have been affected:

Massive floods swamped a fourth major industrial estate in Ayutthaya yesterday, forcing authorities to order the evacuation of workers.

Water breached floodwalls to inundate Bang Pa-in Industrial Estate despite the efforts of the army and factory workers to reinforce defences.

Bang Pa-in district chief Nathee Borsuwan said people were ordered to move immediately to safe ground.

The water level was recorded at 80cm to one metre.

Soldiers and workers had raced to repair a broken floodwall on the eastern side of the estate since early on Friday but failed due to the strong flow of water.

Since the Chao Phraya River overflowed and burst a dyke at Wat Chaiwattanaram on Oct 4, Ayutthaya and downstream areas have been inundated. The Saha Rattana Nakorn, Rojana and Hi-Tech industrial estates were flooded, causing billions of baht of damage.

PBS NewsHour has a transcript from an Oct. 14 show about the flooding. Here’s a passage that caught my eye.

I was wondering if someone might reference Bush and Katrina:

CATHARIN DALPINO: Well, this is really a test for the new prime minister, for Prime Minister Yingluck, the kind of test that the Bush administration had with Hurricane Katrina, that the Japanese government had with the tsunami and the earthquake.

And every government on this planet, with the possible exception of one or two, now operates under performance legitimacy. How well do they do in these kinds of natural disasters? Certainly, in the past five years, Thailand has been very divided politically. It’s interesting in the past couple of days to see the bipartisan spirit or the multi-partisan spirit.

Yesterday, former Prime Minister Abhisit made a call upon Prime Minister Yingluck. He of course was her rival and he was the one that she turned out in the election. And that was a very, very important symbol.

(All emphasis mine.)

For ongoing info, I suggest the Thai Travel News blog.

And a reminder: previous posts with maps, news reports, and more can be found by clicking the Thailand flooding tag.

That’s it for now. If you’ve sent me an email and I haven’t respond yet, please be patient.

Here’s a quick update as of 10 a.m. Bangkok time today, October 16, 2011:

Remember that all past posts — including maps, links to news stories, etc. — can be found by clicking the Thailand flooding tag.

I’m a bit pressed for time, but briefly:

People have written in asking about central Bangkok. What I wrote earlier still holds: Ayutthaya and central Thailand have been hardest hit, and western, northern, and eastern Bangkok are at risk.

Central Bangkok, for the most part, is still dry — from what I’ve seen.

While I’ve noticed that some shops and hotels have erected sandbag defenses here in central Bangkok, I have not seen any major flooding issues for now.

The U.S. embassy in Bangkok has some tips for dealing with the floods.

And their flood information page — especially the maps page — has links to some good resources.

Here are some news reports:

Bloomberg has an overview as of this morning:

Thailand moved to protect the capital, Bangkok, and the main international airport from flood waters as Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra said 10 provinces are still at “critical risk” after being inundated.

And there’s this, on the affect on Thailand’s industrial estates:

Yingluck said the situation remains “critical” in 10 of the 26 provinces still affected by flooding. Floodwaters have swamped industrial estates in Ayutthaya province, 67 kilometers (42 miles) north of Bangkok, halting production at factories operated by Japanese manufacturers including Nikon Corp. and Pioneer Corp.

And the AP has this story from last night that provides a good summary of what’s up:

Beside a wall of white sandbags that has become a front line in Thailand’s battle to prevent an epic season of monsoon floods from reaching Bangkok, needlefish swim through knee-high water inside Sawat Taengon’s home.
On one side, a cloudy brown river pours through a canal diverting water around the Thai capital, just to the south. On the other side, homes just like his are unscathed. Whether floodwaters breach fortified barriers like these this weekend will decide whether Bangkok will be swamped or spared.
As of late Saturday at least, the alarmed metropolis of glass-walled condominiums and gilded Buddhist temples remained unscathed, and authorities were confident it would narrowly escape disaster.

More soon…

5:30 p.m. Bangkok time, October 14, 2011:

As I have noted in my previous posts on the flooding here in Thailand, central Bangkok has so far been largely unaffected.

Since several people have emailed me to ask about this part of town, I thought I would share the cell phone pic below, which I snapped earlier this afternoon.

I noticed a few large puddles on one of the city’s main thoroughfares, Sukhumvit Rd., most likely due to the recent downpours.

But I was somewhat surprised to see that near Sukhumvit Soi 14 and the Asoke BTS station, someone — likely merchants in the buildings on the left — had set up several sandbag barriers:

For the record: I spoke with a vendor who told me these were, indeed, meant to protect the area from potential flooding.

The sandbags weren’t meant meant, she said, to simply shield the shops from puddles that had already accumulated due to rain.

Again, I did not see any flooding along Sukhumvit, and have not seen any evidence of flooding in central Bangkok.

But as I’ve noted earlier, and as the maps I’ve posted show, other parts of the city — especially to the west, north, and east — have been affected and/or are at risk in the days to come.

As ever, I’ll continue sharing updates.

Here’s the latest as of 12:30 p.m. today, Fri., October 14, 2011.

See my previous Thailand flooding posts for an overview of the situation. This brief dispatch will cover some new maps, as they seem hard to come by.

The Nation today has a detailed map, based on government data, of Bangkok areas that could be at risk in the weeks ahead:

Here’s a bigger version.

The Google.org Crisis Response service has a map of Thailand displaying data from various sources. Here’s an embedded image, below.

The clickable map is here.

On the right side of the map, you can choose to display various data sources.

This led me to a detailed UN map showing flood waters in central Thailand as of Oct. 11.

Here’s a screen grab, below.

The full 3.5 MB PDF file can be downloaded here.

Stay tuned. As ever, you can follow me on Twitter for more updates.

Here’s an update on the flooding here in Thailand as of 11:45 p.m. Bangkok time today, October 13, 2011:

Summmary

• Much of central Bangkok is still okay, but there are ongoing worries about parts of the city outside the center, especially to the west, north, and east. (See new map below.) Much will depend on rains and tides in the coming days.
• The international airport, Suvarnabhumi, so far appears to be fine.
• Ayutthaya and central Thailand have been hit hard.
• Hundreds have died and many more displaced throughout Thailand. But for those wondering about tourism in Thailand, again: most of central Bangkok has not been affected.

  The areas near the Chao Phraya river, however, and particularly the western and northern portions of Bangkok, are at risk. And again, Ayutthaya and central Thailand have faced serious flooding.

New flooding map

Today’s Bangkok Post has a map of the city’s areas that could be hit:

News reports

Bloomberg has more info on the flooding’s economic implications:

Thailand said floods that have killed more than 283 people and hurt exports may last until the month’s end, swamp Bangkok and cut deeper into economic growth.

The NYT reports on the big picture:

As some of Thailand’s worst flooding in half a century bears down on Bangkok, submerging cities, industrial parks and ancient temples as it comes, experts in water management say it is human activity that is causing nature to run amok.

Deforestation, overbuilding in catchment areas, the damming and diversion of natural waterways, urban sprawl, and the filling-in of canals are combining with bad planning to turn an unusually heavy monsoon season into a disaster, they say.

The AP describes efforts to dig canals:

Workers hurriedly dredged canals and cut new waterways around Thailand’s capital on Thursday in an attempt to protect the city from the country’s worst floods in decades.

And:

Bangkok has been mostly spared so far, but areas on its outskirts have been inundated and authorities fear that flood waters rushing from the north will combine with rains in the next few days to flood the city.

For photos of the floods, see this Atlantic In Focus post from yesterday.

Additional resources

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post:

• Richard Barrow Tweets regularly about the floods. And his site, Thai Travel News, has regularly updated info.
• Relevant Twitter hashtags are #ThaiFlood (English and Thai) and #ThaiFloodEng (English).
• Twitter lists to watch: my Bangkok journalists list, and my general Thailand list.

More updates to come. If you have reports or photos to share, feel free to email me: newley@gmail.com.

This site continues to receive significant amounts of traffic from folks looking for information on flooding in Thailand.

So here’s a summary of the situation as of 9:45 p.m. Bangkok time today, October 12, 2011:

Summary

Much of greater Bangkok has not been hit by floodwaters. But there are concerns that as tides rise in the coming days, that may change.

The international airport, Suvarnabhumi, so far appears to be unaffected.

Generally, areas near the Chao Phraya river — in Bangkok and in central Thailand — are most at risk. This includes old Bangkok, downtown, near the river.

Much of Ayutthaya has been affected.

Here’s a map called “Bangkok’s Flood-Prevention Plan,” from The Nation.

You can see how authorities are dealing with the flooding here in the Thai capital:

Here’s a larger version.

And here, again, is the map of Thailand I posted yesterday, so you can get a sense of which parts of the country have been hit:

Some news reports from today:

The WSJ describes how industries operating here have been affected:

With rescue teams and troops racing to prevent swelling floodwaters from breaching the defenses of Thailand’s low-lying capital Bangkok, foreign and local businesses continued to calculate the cost of swamped factories and broken supply chains Wednesday, while the prime minister warned retailers against profiteering.

Another WSJ story provides more info on auto makers:

Thailand’s auto exporters are being hit by supply-chain disruptions following the worst flooding the country has seen in nearly half a century.

Bloomberg says that Bangkokians have started hoarding food and water:

Thai Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra urged food producers not to raise prices as Bangkok residents started hoarding rice, instant noodles and bottled water amid conflicting government warnings about floods threatening to inundate the capital this week.

The AP has a dispatch from Ayutthaya:

The lucky ones traverse this flood-submerged Thai city in navy boats and motorized canoes. The rest float on whatever they can find – inner tubes, swan-shaped pedal boats, huge chunks of muddied white plastic foam.

Other resources:

• Bangkok-based Richard Barrow has been Tweeting frequent updates and posting material to his site, Thai Travel News.
• In addition to the #ThaiFlood hashtag, you can search #ThaiFloodEng for exclusively English language news.
• I pointed out my Bangkok journalists Twitter list, but I wanted to mention that I also maintain a general Thailand list that includes more than 300 Thailand-related Twitterers.
• And finally, for ongoing news, you can consult local media such as The Bangkok Post, The Nation, and the official MCOT.

Stay tuned. You can follow me on Twitter for more updates.