Thailand warns of floods that have already killed 22 people

Cities in the northern provinces, crossed by the largest rivers, from Chiang Rai to Sukhothai, via Chiang Mai, Nan, Phrae, have not escaped their flooding problems.

In Nan (to speak of the city closest to me and best known to me) where some districts of the lower town have been flooded to a depth of more than one and a half to two meters, the affected inhabitants will barely have time to notice a drop in the level of the "Nan" river allowing them to evacuate the water and mud from their houses, that a second wave of continuous rains will hit this week and it is likely that the city and its inhabitants, powerless, will again suffer a second rise in water levels and new floods in only two weeks, destroying even more an urban habitat already damaged by nearly 40%, as well as the infrastructure of public services, transport, electricity, not to mention the roads cut by the fall of uprooted trees, landslides and mudslides connecting the provincial capital city to the other towns and villages of this mountainous province...

September is traditionally the wettest month of the monsoon season, while July and August have already exceeded normal rainfall norms...

It promises to be a good time for my next few weeks!!!

Recently in another article whose title I forgot, a Thai politician assured that the current floods would not affect the central provinces, as well as Bangkok, given that "these rains are runoff rains coming from the mountains and not rains from thunderstorms and violent storms crossing the country" (sic). I do not know the level of knowledge of this person, a political authority of the country, in matters of hydrology and rainfall, but he seems to ignore that the water from the incessant rains which feed all the large rivers of the north, as well as the millions of M3 of floods which the waterlogged soils and subsoils can no longer absorb, will have to be evacuated lower down towards the plains of the provinces south of Nakhon Sawan, where all the flooded rivers mentioned above meet and form the Chao Praya which crosses Bangkok...

So to say that Bangkok will not be affected by the consequences of the current floods in the north and northeast of Thailand is once again a statement that is the result of the greatest fantasy and a total ignorance of the situation being experienced.

Nan received a visit on August 25 from Prime Minister Ung Ing Shinawatra, who came to assess the situation by crossing the city in a rubber dinghy with rescuers and volunteers.

Apart from the media impact of this visit, it must be recognised that the authorities of the various governments are powerless to contain these floods which recur from year to year and that the major works of canalisation and water retention, including numerous dams built during the long reign and at his initiative, of His Majesty King Bhumibol, are no longer sufficient to contain the consequences of rainfall which, like this year, is reaching peaks which tend to recur more and more often and in increasingly large quantities.

I fear, unfortunately, that the worst is yet to come in the coming weeks for the central provinces that have been spared so far, as well as for Bangkok and the Chao Phraya Plain as far as the Gulf of Thailand.

Government authorities and those responsible for the capital would be well advised to issue an alert so that people in flood-prone areas can consider measures to protect their property in time in the coming weeks...