This is a terrible on-going event ever since the past few months; it has some coverage on major news sites, but however receives little attention. This flood started from the alarmingly high precipitation in the late monsoon season, particularly in September, but then soon turned into a magnitude that surpasses anything Thailand has seen in 50 years.
One-third of the country is fully submerged under the overwhelming 100 billion cubic meters of water, and would still be underwater at the very least throughout November. Almost 400 people have died since mid-July, and numbers are tallying up. This flood affects more than 9 million people, including hundreds of thousands of now-homeless who desperately needs more clean food&water.
One of the many refugees camp
To top that off, the flood swept across engulfed what was once a bustling industrial and agricultural zones. Companies such as Western Digital, Toyota, etc. has already suffered significant losses and announced that they're halting all productions in the area. Some areas have water as high as 4-5m, leaving the all the factories, homes, and rice fields alike completely helpless. Damage currently estimated by the Chamber of Commerce is now more than 5 Billion Dollars.
Better find a new job soon.
Most people will take a long time to recover from this flood, and a portion will be jobless as well. People who knows the inevitable is coming began stocking up, and the prices for day-to-day groceries skyrocketed through the roof.
Driven from their homes
With the flood, comes other dangers such as crocodiles that escaped from farms, and all the diseases. Most wildlife doesn't fare better than the people either, some were rescued and moved to higher grounds, but moving animals from their natural habitat is not an easy task.
Nowhere to go
The major concern for the moment is the country's capital, which stands between all the water and the sea. Barriers were set-up to prevent water from entering the capital in order in minimize damages, but it's not holding well and water started pouring into certain districts. Riverbanks are brimmed, and will easily go into overflow mode. Some people with relatives in other parts of the country are now fleeing the city.
Bangkok: the Venice of the East - soon to be promoted to the Atlantis of the East.
The, erm...runway of the city's second airport.
No matter what to you do, the vast amount of water is going to take horrendously long to get rid off. Nevertheless, the person who knows best about this, is interestingly, someone who have combated floods after floods for the last few decade: the King of Thailand. Unfortunately, he is too old and sick to advise much, but the key solution that he used more than 15 years ago in another massive flood, was to use water gates to maximize the flow rate of water. A really well-timed opening and closing of the gates to rhyme with the lunar tides can do wonders. This technique worked really well in the past, but requires a lot of calculation to capitalize the tides and modeling the best paths for the water for this to work.The government, however, seems to be quite behind on implementing it.
Images: thairath.co.th, bbc.co.uk
Edit: Since some people were asking if there's a solution: there's one proposed by the King. He, and his team did this 15 years ago and it worked really well. The idea is to divert water to a certain path and let them build up behind the gates during high tides, and release them during low tides. Once the tides come back up close the gates and keep doing it. Follow the river path to use all the gates available. It's quite complex to decide where to barrier up and which gates to close at which time though, since tides come and go progressively, not in an instant. This is possibly the most efficient way to do things as a plus, you don't need to spend the much of the needed money for the feeding of all the people, and repairs afterwards.
At first I wasn't all that surprised by the pictures, seen one flood, seen them all, but then I read the post more carefully, and three things struck me. First, that this has been going on for MONTHS, and that the waters in some areas are 4-5m high. Thats almost 2 stories! Last, the fact that 1/3 of the country is underwater. Thats just madness.
Seriously hope they get some help soon, whether from international aid, or dryer weather.
On October 30 2011 05:01 sephuys wrote: Truly sad, I really hope they can figure something out soon.
There's like nothing you can do to floods :p
See the last part of the main post, a solution was found 15 years ago, but the government is too slow/stupid to follow it properly. You can increase the rate water flows into the ocean, and prevent them from coming back up - but you have to be careful with your timing of floodgates, or you'll be doing the opposite.
On October 30 2011 05:01 sephuys wrote: Truly sad, I really hope they can figure something out soon.
There's like nothing you can do to floods :p
Boil it away with a hundred nukes.
More seriously, I have a co-worker whose parents for some reason live in Bangkok (she's Polish, which is why this is weird). She told me she was getting called daily by her dad, until one day he stopped calling, and she freaked out. Eventually she got in contact with the maid, who told her that they were all safe, and that the maid had to be carried out by my co-worker's dad because she couldn't swim. The world's a small place...
this flood suck. with friends in thailand, they are telling me water elec are all cut. water price skyrocket to 10 fold or something. people are fleeing capital to pattaya and all the tourist attractions.
Terrible news for Thailand in terms of every single aspect imaginable. I hope everything works out for the people and the governement and the wildlife.
Im here now and in the last few hours the flood in Bangkok is slowly starting to recede. I havent been affected Im staying in Bangkapi district and haven't had anything major. But I am scared as I am here with my pregnant wife who is a Thai National and we will have twin boys with a Due date in a little over a month. Things are terrible here and my prayers go out to all Thai family's.
Events like this are likely to only get worse in the forseeable future. That's really depressing, might be worse to Thailand per capita than Japan's earthquake was to Japan...seriously, I can't even imagine losing a third of the United States to flooding.
Do they have mountains there ? Why don't they just go to the mountain and build wooden buildings to live temporary and wait for the flood to end and go back ?
On October 30 2011 05:45 kamikami wrote: Do they have mountains there ? Why don't they just go to the mountain and build wooden buildings to live temporary and wait for the flood to end and go back ?
Thailand has a comparable size to France. How do you evacuate 1/3 of a country? Imagine moving all northern regions of France: Bretange, Normandie, everything above Centre into the Alps - no sweat, that's easy to do.
On October 30 2011 05:56 evanthebouncy! wrote: is this a new thing or has this happened repeatidly only this time is worst?
Heavy monsoon causing 3hrs of water not draining fast enough in some backalley is common; a torrent that covers 1/3 of the country with hundreds of thousands going homeless and unimaginable economic damage is not.
On October 30 2011 06:16 Keitzer wrote: so... are they EVER goign to be un-flooded? like... has any engineers looked at a possible solution that's actually effective??
I'm almost certain they've tried anything to stop this. But at this point, I doubt anything will be the least bit effective.
On October 30 2011 05:01 sephuys wrote: Truly sad, I really hope they can figure something out soon.
There's like nothing you can do to floods :p
Boil it away with a hundred nukes.
More seriously, I have a co-worker whose parents for some reason live in Bangkok (she's Polish, which is why this is weird). She told me she was getting called daily by her dad, until one day he stopped calling, and she freaked out. Eventually she got in contact with the maid, who told her that they were all safe, and that the maid had to be carried out by my co-worker's dad because she couldn't swim. The world's a small place...
Water has such a firggin huge spec heat that you'd probably need tens of thousands of nukes over a week long period... xD
There is huge flood in cambodia too anyone knows where i could find some info on this ? i know some people here havent heard of them in weeks i'm worried
This is the kind of things that's going to happen more and more often as the environment is changing. I wonder how neck deep in shit we have to be before we pull our head out of our asses tell the global warming denialists to go fuck themselves and start looking for solutions that doesn't depend on profit incentives but on survival incentives.
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