Drawing Lines in the Sandbags

For centuries, rainy season runoff has spread out as it flows south (downhill) through the essentially flat delta of Thailand’s Chao Phraya River. Bangkok, at around 10 feet above sea level, sits only a few miles from the sea, on both sides of the river.

This year there’s a Connecticut-sized puddle sitting just north of the city, inundating huge housing estates and industrial parks. That water is taking a while to move through and around the capital, as shown in these striking photographs.

Without retaining walls and drainage systems, all of Bangkok would be under roughly equal levels of water today. Instead, some areas are chest-deep while others are bone-dry. For those people whose first floor is full of stagnant, stinky water, government decisions about where to build the walls probably seem awfully random—especially when they can see untouched neighborhoods from their rooftops. (And let’s not forget how the residents of Ayutthaya and other upstream provinces must feel. They’ve been waterlogged, and most likely unemployed, for weeks.)

Already there are reports of sabotage along the sandbagged lines dividing the lucky neighborhoods from the not-so-lucky (the graphic shows chances that your house is flooded, by zip code). Those areas that have been allowed to soak are well aware that political choices, rather than geography, determined their fate. Further complicating those choices is the fact that the Prime Minister and the Bangkok mayor are political rivals. My sense is that the government could surely have done better, especially with its coordination of communication, but that no administration could have been prepared for this rare event.

Yet planning should start immediately for several predictable consequences. We already know the most common medical complaints: athlete’s foot, muscle strain, fever, skin disease, headache, and snake bites. Coming soon we can expect dengue fever, diarrhea, and lots of depression. Empty store shelves hint at short-term damage to the economy; longer term it’s likely that Thailand’s losses will be Vietnam’s and Indonesia’s gains.

For now my apartment sits barely on the good side of the dividing line, although the street out front is wet. If I walk 200 yards from my door, crossing over the street, a line of sandbags, and a wide canal, I find homes sitting in two feet of water. I’m doubly fortunate for having missed ten days of in-city stress while I was up north in Chiang Mai. The worn-out faces on my colleagues at work (or at least the faces of the 50% who have been able to make it in to the office) show how close many Bangkokians are to the breaking point.

New neighborhoods become submerged every day. Most reports suggest that the floods won’t go away completely until December. As a precaution, residents have parked tens of thousands of cars along the edges of elevated highways and on-ramps. Even though this situation makes traffic even worse than usual, these cars aren’t towed away—there’s no dry place to take them. When the 2011 Thai flood history gets written, it won’t be pretty. Already the tale is plenty nasty, and it’s far from over.