Last year, Thailand suffered historic floods. Forecasts suggest parts of
the capital could be underwater by 2030. Is the country prepared?
When Adri Verwey, a Dutch flood
expert, arrived in Thailand in early October last year, the country was
struggling to prevent a wall of water from flowing southwards to Bangkok. It
was also struggling against itself.
Government departments were
working alone – even sometimes against each other – and in charge was a
weeks-old administration led by a relative unknown in Yingluck Shinawatra
trying to protect the opposition-run capital.
“There were these political
problems,” says Verwey, a consultant with Deltares, a Dutch institute
specializing in flood solutions.
Contacted by Thai authorities
through the Dutch Embassy in Bangkok, Verwey was soon taking charge of crisis
meetings involving the new prime minister, the army and numerous ministries as
they tried to plug leaking dykes and flush water out to sea via poorly
maintained flood channels.
“With a good master plan this
could have been foreseen and prevented,” he says. “That is the nature of human
beings: Something has to happen before action is taken.”
So how well is the country
prepared for next time?
Nearly a year on from Thailand’s
worst disaster in living memory, and the fourth-costliest in the world ever at
an estimated U.S. $45 billion, significant progress has been made, say flood
experts including Verwey. But there is also still plenty to do.
In a key step, the government set
up a super committee chaired by the Science and Technology Minister Plodprasop
Suraswadi designed to oversee water management and connect all the moving parts,
a major problem last year when the country’s two biggest dams were already
90-percent full when a series of tropical storms hit.
At the end of August, the cabinet
allocated over U.S. $20 million for water management in addition to the funding
that had already approved earlier this year. Part of the money will be spent on
a national flood monitoring command center with the help of Dutch firm AGT
International which has designed a similar system for the Yellow River in
China.
The army spent three months
dredging more than 500 kilometers of canals in Bangkok, more than 2,000 Thai
civil servants have been sent to South Korea to learn from experts in Seoul and
Thailand has in turn received similarly qualified Chinese in Bangkok.
Some of these measures are
short-term and others – like the computerized flood command center – will take
longer to get up and running.
In the meantime, the many
factories that make up Thailand’s industrial heartland to the north of Bangkok
have taken matters into their own hands.
Mostly positioned a matter of a
few kilometers from the Chao Phraya River on its main flood plain, these
industrial zones were wiped out one by one in October of last year as water
levels reached four meters in some places disrupting production at the likes of
Hitachi, Nikon, Sony and Honda.
Last week, bulldozers were
putting the finishing touches to a reinforced wall around Hi-Tech Industrial
Estate, defenses that have been replicated at a host of other manufacturing
zones nearby. All are nearly complete.
Just north, workers were
scheduled by mid-September to finish protecting another cornerstone of
Thailand’s economy – Ayutthaya, the ancient capital which draws millions of
visitors each year.
“All our main infrastructure is
in good condition,” said Royol Chitradon, director of Thailand’s Hydro and Agro
Informatics Institute.
The difference between 2012 and
2011, he says, is that the watershed area has been extended, widened,
reinforced and rehabilitated, additional pumps have been installed to increase water
flow out of populated areas and the water in the main dams was steadily reduced
leading up to the start of the wet season in May.
Although areas in the north and
west of the country have seen flooding recently – so too Bangkok – the monsoon
season has not been half as ferocious as last year says Adityam Krovvidi, head
of the Asia-Pacific office of Impact Forecasting, a risk modeling division at
the World’s biggest insurance company Aon Benfield.
“Bangkok has already seen [the]
near ‘perfect storm’ last year,” he said of the wet season, which included five
tropical storms, already wet conditions in the south around the capital and a
high spring tide out in the Gulf of Thailand.
In other words, these were
one-in-a-hundred-year weather events, according to experts. Dutch flood expert
Verwey says he has seen reports suggesting Thailand may only see the same freak
patterns every 250 years. The problem for Thailand – and many other countries –
is that these freak weather patterns are almost certain to get more frequent.
“In the future, land subsidence
and climate factors could also contribute,” warns Krovvidi.
If Bangkok were not already
ideally positioned for flooding – it lies at the low point of a country
surrounded in the north, east and west by low-lying mountains – it is also
sinking. The most pessimistic forecasts suggest parts of the capital could be
underwater by 2030 as the increasing population sucks up ground water, and
other environmental factors take their toll.
Combine that with a country that
has lost half its tree cover in the past 70 years and you have the ingredients
for a modern-day Atlantis, a similar situation facing Manila and Ho Chi Minh
City, according to a joint report at the end of last year by the World Bank,
Asian Development Bank and International Cooperation Agency of Japan.
Songsuda Adhibai, co-founder of
S+PBA, an architecture firm that made headlines recently when it designed a
Bangkok cityscape floating on water, says the Thai capital’s future flood
problems are not just about building dykes and ferrying in sand bags. Long-term
solutions are needed, she says, ones which plan ahead beyond just managing
water and consider the whole layout and function of the city.
“Don’t ask [so] far ahead about
serious flooding,” says Songsuda. “Bangkok is a city that doesn’t have a master
plan.”
Steve Finch
Business & Investment Opportunities
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