Watersheds in SE Asia. The flooding comes in the Chao Phraya one in central Thailand. Notice how neatly it all drains through the Bangkok area.
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.
