Thai premier calls for patience in flood-hit Bangkok

Oct 30, 2011, 0:42 GMT

Bangkok - Thai Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra urged flood-hit Bangkok residents to be patient and not destroy dykes, insisting that waters will recede soon, news reports said Sunday.

'The situation should improve after Monday,' she said Saturday night 'I believe we will be able to restore normalcy in a short time.'

Bangkok has been bracing for floods for weeks as a sea of water flows from the central provinces on the capital and towards the Gulf of Thailand.

Estimates of the amount of water threatening the metropolis vary between 4,000 million to 15,000 million cubic metres.

Bangkok has a drainage capacity of about 200-300 million cubic metres per day, meaning it will take weeks or months to free the city of the inundation, Anond Snidvongs, director of the Geoinformatics and Space Technology Development Agency, told the Bangkok Post.

Efforts by authorities to keep the floodwaters out of inner Bangkok, the centre for government offices, business, embassies and retail outlets, have been hampered this weekend by the high level of the Chao Phraya River, which runs through the capital.

Some Bangkok neighbourhoods along the river were flooded up to a metre deep Saturday, especially Chinatown and the west bank, known as Thonburi.

The river embankment can withstand a water level below 2.5 metres. On Saturday, during the high tides in the Gulf of Thailand, the level reached 2.57 metres.

On Sunday it was expected to reach 2.65 metres, making more floods in the city inevitable.

'As for inner Bangkok, there is a possibility in the worse-case-scenario that there will be flooding of between 10 centimetres to 1.5 metres,' said Justice Minister Pracha Promnok, who heads the Flood Relief Operations Centre (FROC).

The Royal Irrigation Department on Saturday said if no more barriers rupture through November 6, central Bangkok could escape flooding.

Districts in northern Bangkok started flooding October 22, but the run-off from two months of flooding that began in northern Thailand was moving slowly into other parts of city. In satellite maps, central Bangkok appeared as an island surrounded by floods slowly draining south into the Gulf of Thailand.

Don Mueang Airport, which handles some domestic flights, has been closed for a week because of the floods, but Suvarnabhumi International Airport remained operational Sunday.

'The FROC is confident that the government will be able to protect Suvarnabhumi from the flooding,' Pracha told foreign diplomats Saturday.

But he added that the U-Tapao Airport in Chonburi, 130 kilometres south-east of Bangkok, had been put on standby to handle international flights should Suvarnabhumi be inundated.

FROC, set up on October 8 to coordinate the government's flood relief efforts, was forced to move its office from Don Mueang to the Petroleum Authority of Thailand building on Saturday.

This year's monsoon floods have been the worst in decades, claiming 377 dead and causing damages between an estimated 140 billion baht (4.6 billion dollars) to 500 billion baht (16.6 billion).

The central bank has lowered its gross domestic product forecast for 2011 due to the disaster, from 4.6 per cent growth to 2.6 per cent, assistant governor Paiboon Kittisrikangwan said Friday.