Reservoirs fill up with rainwater; flooding in many places
22 September 2013
While authorities believe they are certain there will be no repeat of the 2011 floods, the reports are somewhat ominous. The reservoirs fill with rainwater, the water level of the Pasak River rises by 1 meter, in Si Sa Ket a man was swept away by the water and died, in Ang Thong province the Chao Praya reached the critical water level of 7,5 meters and the water level in two canals in three districts of Bangkok has risen sharply. An overview:
- Parts of five provinces in the Pasak basin are at risk of flooding. Those provinces are Loei, Phetchabun, Saraburi, Lop Buri and Ayutthaya.
- The water outflow from the Pasak Cholasith dam in Lop Buri has been increased and the water has now reached the Phra Ram VI reservoir in Ayutthaya. That dam has doubled its water outflow.
- Residents in sixty villages and the merchants of a market along the Pasak in Tha Rua district have been asked to prepare for flooding.
- Three districts in Ang Thong province are at risk of flooding when the Chao Praya dam in Chai Nat is forced to discharge more water.
- Four districts in Prachin Buri have been flooded in recent days due to heavy rains. In some places the water is 60 cm high. The Prachin Buri-Sa Kaeo road is impassable. A coordination center is set up by order of the governor.
- In Chachoengsao, four villages with more than XNUMX houses in Sanam Chai Khet district have been flooded. Flat-bottomed boats are on their way to evacuate the residents.
- At the end of the Khlong Prem Prachakorn and Khlong Song canals in Muang, Sai Mai and Lak Si (Bangkok), the municipality has installed pumps to pump the water to the Chao Praya.
- The Meteorological Department predicts that it will continue to rain in parts of the Central Plains, East and Northeast in the coming days.
- In the Gulf of Thailand and the Andaman Sea, the monsoon creates waves of 2 to 4 meters. Small vessels should not set sail.
(Source: Bangkok Post, Sept. 22, 2013)
Photo homepage: Aid workers in action Saturday in Ban Kruat (Buri Ram). Six villages were flooded by water from the mountains.
As usual, people only think/act when it is too late. When are people going to make a comprehensive plan and first of all keep the rivers/canals clean?
When it dries again, the problem will soon be forgotten. And so nothing happens again (“after all, there is no problem (anymore) at that moment”).
The apparently available money for the HSL could be better used to improve/maintain the waterways. It also seems a good idea to set up a “Rijkswaterstaat”: it can then draw up a comprehensive plan. Prevents all kinds of owners of different reservoirs from acting purely on local interest.
I'm afraid that nothing structural will happen again.
Dan Khun Thot, in the Isan, is also experiencing flooding. This morning my wife and I wanted to pick up a Dutchman, 30 km outside the municipality, but we had to make a U-turn on the road from the village center to the exit Sikiu, because the road was unusable (about 10, 15 km) due to flooding . Houses, shops and farmlands under water as far as the eye could see. The water flowed as if it were a river and a new depression is reported. There are also reports of flooding in Nakhon Ratchasima, 50 km east of Dan Khun Thot. Where I live, at the beginning of the vast rice fields and 5 km outside the village center on the other side of the municipality, there is no sign of flooding.
Preventive cleaning will not be easy, because as soon as the water in the river starts to rise, the garbage is brought out to be dumped in the river, not knowing (or wanting to know) that people also live downstream.
I blame all the misery on the continuous deforestation, which means that no solutions are possible anymore.
Thailand is a monsoon country, just like India and China. In the months of July, August and September there is an average of 5 (five) times as much rain as in the Netherlands in those months. In 2011 there was another 50 percent more than average, and already 20-30 percent more. This means that flooding in Thailand is a completely normal and natural occurrence that has been occurring for many centuries. It has nothing to do with deforestation, full reservoirs or unexcavated canals. Older Thais find flooding quite normal. Bangkok used to be regularly flooded. It is true that Thailand has become much more vulnerable to natural flooding due to the enormous increase in infrastructure and buildings. You can say that you can bring some relief here and there, but preventing it completely is impossible.
Thank you, Tjamuk, for supporting me in this. So it's not the stupid, lazy Thais who can't plan and just let everything run its course.
I should have left that stupid and lazy out. The point is that the floods of 2011 would have been almost as bad even with the best management, which does not detract from the fact that there are incompetent politicians and bureaucrats. I have no opinion about the assistance at the time, except that it is always chaotic and incomplete in such a situation. Nothing can withstand such a flood, all experts agree on that, whatever you can read on the blog. In the end, only one goal was chosen: to ensure that the business center of Bangkok would not be flooded, which often happened in the past. It succeeded, although it caused the water in the suburbs of Bangkok to rise higher than it otherwise would have been.
@ Tino Kuis You write: 'The point is that the floods of 2011 would have been almost as bad even with the best management...' May I point out that Thai experts thought otherwise and I have read them often enough in News from Thailand quoted. To mention: the reservoirs were much too full at the beginning of the rainy season, dikes along rivers are not maintained, canals are not dredged regularly or not at all and water hyacinth is not removed. Nevertheless, that year there was 30 percent more rain (not 50 percent, as you write), so the flooding would have been significant even with those measures. That there will be 20-30 percent more rain this year, as you also write, I have not read anywhere yet, and I still read the newspaper every day.
I think you're right Tony.
These areas used to fill up too, but then no cat worried about that because it was just an open, unused area, ie you had natural catch basins.
Now that those natural flood areas are built up, it seems like everything is going to be flooded, but the water still flows wherever it used to go.
The problem is not that the water finds a way to where it has been built, the problem is that they have built where the water runs to.
I completely agree with Hans.
Also a few personal experiences:
In 2011, just after the water receded, I surveyed the damage Along the Yom River in Sukhothai. I had brought my small video camera to record some of the damage to the home front from the car window. Then I heard a furious scream… My Thai guide immediately accelerated, shouting: “Get out, they think we are from the government!”
The population there probably did not think that all Thai (The Responsible) had done their job so well.
The great flood of Sukhothai in 2012 was yet to come…
Six months later I was in Pathum Thani (near Don Muang) in a house where I had already stayed a few times. The damage was considerable and I could see the dirty edge of the tide line on the walls from a man's height. The resident had since invested minimal money in the house, because he thought it was a shame. He no longer had any confidence in the government's promises and said: "Within a few years, everything will flood again."
The solution in short, even more dams and reservoirs and drainage channels.
However, the heavily affected forest area will be sacrificed even further, we can read all about it on Thailandblog.
Oh, let them build a dike about ten meters high along the coast, then everyone will be protected against a tsunami, but then no more tourists will come.
Dear people, nature has been going its own way for thousands of years and cannot be tamed, people are consciously looking for risk areas all over the world and if something happens again somewhere in the world, we can see the consequences.
I have lived in Thailand for 22 years now and have really never heard anything credible from the Thai government. So in this case… make your own schedule and follow the news.
Jantje lives in Pasang in Lamphun province.
And so far I haven't seen much rain.
We can still use a lot of water here. OK, last week there was a big downpour that partially flooded the supply roads in the capital and to the Nikkom industrial estate.
Also at Jantjes Place there was just as much water for a short period.
But so far we are still pretty dry here.
If there is no more and the monsoon period is soon over , I think this could become a big problem .
Our area is known for the Logans or while in Thai Lumyai.
Greetings Jantje.
Floods in the rainy season may not be completely preventable, but the damage that the floods cause each time can certainly be reduced. And then I arrive at the list that Tino also sketches. The traffic jams in Bangkok are also not due to the government's measure to subsidize the purchase of a new car, but the measure has certainly NOT contributed to reducing them. The same is true with deforestation, overdue maintenance of waterways, bridges and locks, lack of predictive models, unwillingness to use population data in assessments and measures, arrogance of policy makers to take observations and experiences of citizens seriously. of disaster scenarios and evacuation plans, the implicit permission for people to settle in potential flood areas, lack of clarity about the decision-making to release water from the reservoirs (who decides when and on what grounds), limited knowledge among politicians about the consequences of their decisions, wrong and untimely information...etc etc etc etc
Chris,
A short and clear summary of reality. Of course one cannot control nature. But then doing nothing at all or doing exactly the wrong thing is not going to help at all.
In the Netherlands we do everything (or at least a lot) about it. Although we still regularly have (relatively minor) floods, it is still nice to prevent that about half of the country is under water. There is also a degree of advancing insight (ie not just trying to beat nature, but rather letting nature do its part).
And that could also help here in Thailand. But that requires perseverance and long-term thinking in combination with regular maintenance and……… a more coordinated approach. Ad hoc responses never yield anything substantial.