Bangkok’s governor declared the Thai capital a disaster zone on Saturday after nearly three days of unbroken rain left major roads under water, cars partly submerged and residents wading through waist-deep floods.
Governor Chadchart Sittipunt extended the declaration across all 50 of the city’s districts, Al Jazeera reported. Almost 300mm (11.8 inches) of rain had fallen since Thursday afternoon.
“The rain keeps falling and we are doing our best,” Chadchart said. “We are trying to pump the water out, but the water in canals are full. The risk areas are those who live near canals. Every canal is now filled.”
He warned that the crisis “poses a risk to people’s lives” and could damage public and private property, Hiru News reported, carrying wire copy. The east of the city has been worst hit.
Not a flash flood
“This is not a flash flood; this is persistent heavy rain since Thursday evening, and it shows no sign of letting up,” Al Jazeera’s Tony Cheng reported from the city. The weather agency forecast further thunderstorms over the weekend.
The army is setting up shelters and field kitchens. The Bangkok Metropolitan Administration has designated schools as temporary accommodation, opened MRT park-and-ride carparks free of charge through 2 October, and asked residents to avoid unnecessary travel. The government issued an emergency advisory telling people living near canals to move their possessions to higher ground.
Supermarkets filled with residents stocking up. “I’m worried too, because I haven’t stocked up on food beforehand, and I’ve never faced this kind of situation alone before, since my parents aren’t with me,” 19-year-old Sansuk Laowatcharakul told reporters. A 67-year-old vendor, Somkid Pheuk-ngam, said simply: “I cannot go anywhere” — and called it worse than the 2011 flood, which killed more than 500 people across Thailand.
Suvarnabhumi, the city’s main airport, is operating normally, though the tourism authority has advised travellers to allow an extra two to three hours.
Two reference points
The two accounts reach for different benchmarks. Al Jazeera measures the flooding against 2011, Thailand’s catastrophic flood year. Hiru’s wire copy points instead to November, when at least 145 people died in what it calls the country’s worst floods in decades, concentrated in the southern provinces.
Neither report gives a casualty or evacuation figure for the current flooding.
Context
The Thai emergency lands while Sri Lanka is working through a wet spell of its own. Heavy rain has affected more than 2,800 people across 15 districts, the Met Department has warned of elevated flood risk through October and November, and a high-waves warning remains in force along the southern coast. No forecaster has linked the two situations.
