Repacking aid bags is nearly finished. The entire back of our office is full of them too.

The flood is still going on, and no one is sure how long it will continue. Various authorities have been making statements for the last month and most of them have turned out to be wrong. Sue comes into Bangkok airport on the 21st. I hope it is still open then. We have to get our Myanmar visa then. Will the consulate be closed due to flooding? Pretty hard to make plans. The stores are running out of all kinds of things.

Two days ago we left on our second trip to aid flood victims, taking the aid I already talked about . This time we went due west from Nang Rong to the south western part of Lop Buri province, near its capital city. Roads on the direct route were flooded, so we detoured quite a ways to the north and circled around, finally heading south east as we came in. We left Nang Rong at 11 PM. The GPS estimated we would arrive around 2:30 AM. We pulled in at 6.

On the way in we had to go slowly since the roads, being higher than most of the rest of the land, were taken up from one side to the centerline by various tents and other temporary structures. Some people were living out on the roads, others just moved all their refrigerators, motor bikes and anything else they did not want under water out there. I saw a lot of nice furnture items also. I hope the rains, which now are dying out, haven’t ruined them.

This was organized by the schools and teachers in the Nang Rong area, with assistance from our foundation. Our board member Tassanee is one of the main leaders of the local teachers associations and was the primary organizer of this event, just as she was of the one before. We used a large school song taew, like the one in a previous post, to transport the aid packages.

Another teacher from our area, a friend of Tassanee, has relatives in the middle of the flooded area. They are fortunate to have a large home on a raised area which has not been hit even though their next door neighbors were. That was where we distributed the aid packages to the people of two villages.

Our large truck could not come in here over the bridge, so we transferred half our load to three pickups. One is already empty in this picture.

We’re driving on the wrong side on the way to the second two villages. The road is a spillway with water flowing to the right, over the bank and into a canal.

After that we drove a short distance to another village area and distributed the rest of our aid bags to two more villages. Good order was kept by the village heads. They each had a list and checked off each family receiving aid. Bags were set aside for elderly and others who could not come to the distribution site.

Nothing is flatter than a rice field, so when they flood the whole area for miles is under water. Many homes built at the edge of the fields looked to be lake front property at first glance. We saw this from a longtail boat that took us out to view some of the flooded area. They only slowed a little when they crossed the roads, since those are usually the highest part of the land.

Lake front community? Partially flooded village. The expanse of water in the forground covers their rice fields.

Communities all over on the outside have been responding and taking aid into the flooded areas. Our area teachers are just one such. I did notice a Seven Eleven store just a few miles from where we gave out our aid had as much on its shelves as those in the Nang Rong area do. A lot of the major commercial supply lines are still working. If those trucks, which were coming into the area anyway, could have brought the aid it would have been so much more efficient. That is similar to what I heard about Hurricane Katrina in the US. The Walmart supply chain was working fine. When government aid and law enforcement officials needed supplies, they just went and bought them at Walmart.

Whether efficient or not, Thai people seem glad to help each other. The waters rise and fall slowly. People are rarely swept away. It’s fortunate not to have the large loss of life that is becoming familiar with the tsunamis and cyclones in this area. Still, a huge proportion of the Thai population will take a severe economic hit, and they don’t have insurance anything like we do in the US.

Certainly disaster relief is not the main function of Opportunity Foundation. It’s not anywhere in our charter. During this time in Thailand everyone who can is helping those in trouble. There is no reason our foundation should be any different.

Nathan made it back to Nang Rong this evening. Two days ago there was no flooding in the Mo Chit bus station area. Yesterday it was knee deep and nothing could go in it. This morning the water was down enough to be passable while it had gotten worse in other areas. The route from Bangkok to Nang Rong was dry most all the way, but it was a very different way that he had never been before, and several hours slower.

Overall, I think the flooding is getting worse in Bangkok, and may steadily do so for a few more weeks. Different parts of the city are at slightly different levels, however, so water will slosh from one part to another. What amazes me is that, since the one that flooded Don Muang airport, I have heard of no further incidents of people tearing down dikes that made flooding worse in their area in order to save a location the government deemed more important. There are a lot of such dikes and pumps like that in Bangkok right now. What if someone told you that the water was going to come a meter high into your neighborhood, but instead they needed to build a dike and make it two meters high in order to protect the business district next door? The previous post gives a good summary of the flood and its causes.

Some of the donations from this school. Parents and others were still dropping stuff off while we were there.

Like last time our board member Tasanee Lapimai is helping with another flood relief effort for the area due west of us and north of Bangkok. This is in the south central part of the Chao Phraya watershed shown on the first map in my previous blog entry. We are still getting flood relief supplies dropped off at the foundation office. Typically they are dropped off by a couple of teachers in a pickup truck bringing items donated at their schools, but some are from individuals who stop by. Tasanee and I drove about 30 km east to a school in the Prakon Chai area to pick up their donations. Their donations, part shown in the picture, completely filled her pickup with more stuffed in the back of the cab.

School starts with the students lining up in front of the classrooms, raising the flag and listening to a short speech. They told me it is this way every day. The only difference was that flood relief and the school’s efforts was the speech topic today. Tasanee and I each said something also. I think the students appreciate me because my Thai is still shaky enough that I make sure to quit while I’m ahead, making for a very short speech.

I think Thais like to surround things like the giving of aid with a lot of ceremony and photographing because they are part of the Buddhist tradition making merit. To a lesser degree we do the same in the U.S. although some of our traditions say we should keep it down.

Tomorrow we load all the stuff up into a borrowed truck and leave for the flood area. I’ll tell how it turns out when we get back.

You have probably seen a number of news reports by now of the Thailand floods. Maybe you read my recent post about some of our flood relief work. It is pretty unusual, especially the flooding of much of Bangkok, with maybe more yet to follow. A city of 10 million or more covers quite a lot of ground. Many parts of Bangkok have up to 6 feet of water now. All over the country about 500 people have died (most from electrocution, not drowning), which is not so many when you consider how many millions are affected. It is good that the water has come on slowly with some warning rather than all at once as it did a few years ago next door when cyclone Nargis hit Myanmar.

This number may go way up. Many people in Bangkok will not leave their homes. They may end up stranded on an upper floor, however. It may be hard for it to sink in that areas could remain flooded for a MONTH or more. This is not just a few people. There is no reliable estimate, but I believe it is in the ten or even hundred thousands. What will they do for food and clean water? There will be none to be had in many areas even if they can get out of their house. There have been many floods in many places in the world, but the scale of this one is really unusual.

An awful lot of Thailand, especially the central area around and north of Bangkok, is pretty flat and very close to sea level. Water can drain from it to the ocean, but it can take a long time to do it. They day may not be too far off when Bangkok, which is slowly sinking, will build dikes to keep the sea back like in the Netherlands.

Forests in SE Asia. Central Thailand does not have much forest to soak up the rain.

I think that, at least theoretically, much of the flooding could have been prevented. While I have not researched this much, this is what I have heard. The flooding appears to be caused by:

1. Much of the old forests, which could have soaked up some of the water, have been cut over the years so there is more runoff now, especially from the central low lying area, Bangkok and north of Bangkok, that is more built up. That’s where a lot of the flooding is now.

2. There are a number of dams in Thailand. I can find data seven years ago that 11.5% of the country’s power was hydroelectric. I think it’s just a bit more now. For best power generation, you want full reservoirs to take you through the dry season which starts mid October. On the other hand, you should keep the reservoir level down during the rainy season to have room for excess runoff.

3. The rain this year was pretty normal until September and some of October, when it was much higher than normal.

Put all that together and you can guess what happened. Many places were flooding, things were getting bad, and that’s exactly when they had to open up all the dam spillways to relieve stress on the over flooded reservoirs.

2553 is Thai for 2010 and 2554 is 2011. The two bars are September. It rained a lot in October too. Graph is from a subtitled series of videos worth watching even for foreigners.

Now it seems some Bangkok areas have just enough large pumps to transfer water to some major canals that can still take it. If one of these breaks down, as it did yesterday in the Mo Chit area of northern Bangkok, the area quickly floods. I know this because my son Nathan who is visiting here, went to Bangkok yesterday morning to handle some business thinking he would come back today.

Nathan arrived in Bangkok yesterday afternoon at the main bus terminal in the northern Mo Chit area and everything was perfectly normal. This morning when he arrived in the Mo Chit area on the skytrain he looked down from the elevated station to see knee deep water everywhere and no taxis or anything else to get to the bus station. He went back one station which was dry and found a taxi (despite what I said in my last blog entry, the rules are different now in much of Bangkok, if the taxis are running at all) that would charge extra to attempt to get to the bus station. The taxi quit halfway there due to deep water.

So Nathan is stuck in Bangkok until he figures out another way to get here. This country has about 65 million people, with 11 or 12 million of them in Bangkok. When things break down in Bangkok, the entire rest of the country feels it big time. The shelves are often bare here in our local markets and Seven Elevens because goods did not get delivered from Bangkok. Now bottled water water is getting in short supply because the main factory that makes the plastic water bottles is in Bangkok and was recently flooded.

There is still some bottled water. It an other supplies have been building up in our foundation office for the last few days. This Friday we are taking them, via boat I think, into some flooded areas north of Bangkok which are due west from us here. This appears to be relief project of our local area teachers working with the military this time. I’ll bring back a few pictures if I can.

I just got off the phone with Mom. She’s seen the news reports about flooding in Thailand and has called for the second time to make sure I have not been swept away by raging waters. It’s not flooding in the Nang Rong area, but it is raining a lot, including right now, and yesterday, the day before…

I’ve written so many times how little we are inconvenienced by rain here. Even in the rainy season when I’ve been here it usually rains at night, or if it does during the day it comes down in buckets for fifteen minutes and then is over. I was here all of June, which is rainy season, this year and rarely stayed in due to rain.

This time it’s different, and there’s flooding in a number of areas, including Bangkok, that may well take a month to go away. Bangkok is really low, nearly sea level, so even if the ocean does not wash in, it can take a long time for water draining from the rest of the country to get through and out of Bangkok. For example, Suvarnabhumi airport elevation is five feet above sea level, and that sea is not far away.

Five of our girls taking supplies into a classroom for temporary storage.

Our board member Tasanee Lapimai, a schoolteacher in Nang Rong, organized some area teachers to provide assistance for the flood victims. Our foundation participated in both donations and volunteering. With Nang Rong Community School as the drop off point supplies came in steadily for a few days, were stacked by volunteers, loaded into a large truck and taken south. My car and a pickup with additional supplies and some teenagers for unloading went along as well.

We expected to leave at 8 AM, but did not get away until after noon. The delay had something to do with drugs being transported through our area. We finally went to the police station and got them to inspect our truck so everyone could be satisfied we were not carrying drugs, except for the known drugs we had for the flood victims.

Highway 1, the main road from the North into Bangkok, was closed due to flooding. We took an alternate route to the shelter set up at Thammasat University. We wanted to take our supplies to Ayutthaya, on the west side of the river from Bangkok, but the police and military did not allow anyone to enter the flooded areas. We soon did run into that horror affecting a much wider area of Thailand, the traffic jam. That bypass of highway 1 took us two extra hours, since everyone else was taking the bypass with us.

Tasanee checks off some of the more important of our supplies outside the Don Muang terminal building.

We arrived at Thammasat early in the evening. We heard there were more than 2000 people sheltered there. We saw many volunteers, but most of the others were housed in the dormitories, away from the convention center where all the goods were dropped. They could take our supplies, but already had plenty. Going further to the distribution center set up at Don Muang Airport made more sense.

Volunteer young people repackage assistance goods in one of the downstairs terminal areas.

Don Muang was the international airport until replaced by Suvarnabhumi in 2007. It is still used for domestic flights and is a huge place. There were vast piles of bottled water and other supplies both outside and inside the terminal. School is out here now, so there were hordes of university students along with farang backpacker types throughout the terminal repackaging donated items into “care packages” which were loaded onto various military transports for delivery to the flood areas.

It was into the morning hours by the time our supplies were unloaded and we headed back, but the traffic on the bypass was much less. Nathan and I finally got to bed at 4:30 AM.

Given the scale of things at Don Muang, our donation was a drop in the bucket. Still, it’s great that so many Thai people are helping each other and was fun to be a small part of it.