Ayutthaya picks up the pieces as floodwaters recede

By Somchai Kwankijswet and Peter Janssen Nov 10, 2011, 7:13 GMT

Ayutthaya, Thailand - For Pao Khunpol, a 49-year-old shop owner in Thailand's ancient capital of Ayutthaya, this year's monsoon floods were the most terrifying experience of her life.

On October 5, the Chao Phraya River that surrounds Ayutthaya, making it an island-city, overflowed its banks with a vengeance, inundating Pao's two-storey shophouse to the ground floor ceiling.

'We didn't have time to save anything but our lives,' said Pao, who had to flee with her family to a government evacuation centre. After a few days, she began to worry about her shop so she returned and stayed on the second floor while the city remained under water.

'One day we saw a crocodile swim by,' Pao said. 'I'm not kidding.'

By Sunday, Ayutthaya's floodwaters had receded enough for Pao and her family to start hosing off the ground floor of their shop, collect rubbish and take stock. The floods, and perhaps some neighbours, had emptied her shop of sundry goods - beer, cigarettes and odd and ends.

Sirima Chaithongsri, 38, was standing in what used to be her restaurant in downtown Ayutthaya but is now an empty building.

'Everything went with the water,' Sirima said. 'I'll need to replace everything and the government is only offering us 5,000 baht (166 dollars) as compensation.'

Ayutthaya was Thailand's capital from 1350 until 1767, when it was sacked by the Burmese, forcing the Thais to migrate south, eventually establishing their new capital in Bangkok in 1782.

Only 90 kilometres north of Bangkok, the ruins of Ayutthaya have long been a popular side trip for tourists.

And in Thailand, where there are tourists, there are elephants for them to ride.

The Ayutthaya Elephant Farm, originally situated on a low-lying area in the old capital, had to move its 169 pachyderms to higher ground twice last month to keep them out of the floodwaters.

'The elephants are stressed from all the moving and from not having enough to eat,' said Laithongrian Meephan, owner of the farm.

'I'm stressed too,' he said, as he organized the drainage of the farm. 'I want to reopen the farm by November 15 because we need to start making money to feed the elephants,' Laithongrian said.

An adult elephant eats about 150 kilograms of food a day.

While Ayutthaya city is a tourist attraction, much of Ayutthaya province has been turned into an industrial zone over the past two decades, despite sitting on what was clearly a flood plain for the Chao Phraya River.

Five major industrial estates situated in Ayutthaya were swamped by last month's floods, forcing about 1,000 factories to shut down and putting some 300,000 staff out of work.

The estates, built in low-lying areas, will take longer to dry out than the old city.

Rojana Industrial Park, which houses 230 factories including the major production facilities in Thailand for Honda Motor Co, is still under two metres of water.

'This is an improvement,' Rojana's marketing director Kosit Sombatthawee said. 'Last week it was three metres deep.'

The park has constructed a new wall around the compound and has starting pumping water off the premises.

'I think it will take 15 to 20 days to pump all the water out,' Kosit said.

Ayutthaya's inundation has disrupted supplies to the automotive and electronics industry worldwide.

Honda last week announced it would also need to cut production in Japan, the United States and Canada because of the interruption to the supply of parts from Thailand.

California-based Western Digital Corp, the world's largest maker of hard disk drives, until October produced 60 per cent of its world output in its Ayutthaya factory.

Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatara on Tuesday promised to spare no expense in putting in place a flood prevention system that will assure this year's flood disaster is never repeated in the province.

The disaster has called into question why so many industrial estates were built in Ayutthaya's flood plains in the first place.

There have been similar questions raised about the over-building and rapid urbanization of Ayutthaya city itself, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

'Ayutthaya was originally designed to be flooded and designed to drain water, so if you have a lot of new building going up that obstructs the water flow, that exacerbates the flooding problem,' said one Bangkok-based UNESCO official, who asked to remain anonymous.