Water Over the Banks

Flooding has been in the news for weeks here. Nearly half of both Thailand and Cambodia have been inundated at various points since July.

Why are things worse than during rainy seasons in the past? Fingers are pointing lots of directions: deforestation, climate change, poorly planned dam releases, and unspecified “revenge.” 

Despite provinces just upstream being under as much as two meters of water, Bangkok has been spared so far by various engineering feats, from levees, to sandbags, to using Thai Navy vessels to push water out to sea. Every day we hear something new about which water will go where. Often reports contradict themselves. While headlines say “the danger is past,” government spokespeople announce, “We’re not sure if the dikes will hold.” And vice versa.

After a while, we find ourselves with the boy-who-cried-wolf problem. Or the waiting-for-the-debt-collection-agency-to-call problem. Rain falls in buckets for about an hour most afternoons, but somehow our neighborhood streets dry off quickly and we start to believe we’re untouchable.

We’re in denial, of course. We have colleagues who aren’t coming to work because their cars are submerged. We’ve seen the Internet images of people wading through chest-high water. We know the grocery store shelves are empty because of panic buying.

We and the government spokespeople aren’t the only ones prone to the natural human tendency to hope for the best. Anyone could feel paralyzed if they thought too long about refugees from the countryside, diseases breeding in stagnant water, or abandoned cars blocking overpasses. Overwhelmed enough, at any rate, to say, “whatever will be, will be.”

Maybe worst of all, our awareness of urbanization and corruption in Southeast Asia tells us that this disaster isn’t 100% natural, and that the suffering isn’t being shared equally. In other words, certain areas have been allowed to flood so that more crowded or privileged areas can be saved. Tough times here.