Thai airport hands out sleeping pills to stressed-out neighbours

Sep 3, 2007, 4:15 GMT

Bangkok - Bangkok's Suvarnabhumi International Airport is distributing sleeping pills to neighbouring residents in an effort to lull growing complaints about noise pollution, news reports said Monday.

Residents living near the capital's new airport told the Bangkok Post newspaper that home-deliveries of sleeping pills were the airport's latest remedy for communal insomnia and stress caused by the constant overhead jet traffic.

'First they gave us earplugs, then sleeping pills,' said Thanatos Preeprem, a sleep-deprived Suvarnabhumi neighbour. He and other residents living near the airport said sleeping pills were delivered by a mobile medical unit run by the Airports of Thailand (AoT), the state enterprise that manages the 3.9-billion-dollar airport.

'And now that some of us have developed respiratory problems, possibly caused by oil vapour from the aircraft, AoT suggested we should buy face masks,' said Thanatos.

Some 32 communities in the airport's vicinity have threatened to launch a balloon protest on Friday to halt all flights unless the AoT meets their demands to be compensated for constant noise pollution.

The protesters were scheduled to hand heir petition to the AoT on Monday.

The planned balloon protest was prompted by a cabinet decision on May 29 to reduce the 'noise hazard zone' around the airport, excluding scores of homeowners from state compensation that might have allowed them to move.

The community uproar is the latest of several mishaps to rattle Bangkok's new airport, touted as the pride of the nation by former premier Thaksin Shinawatra.

The massive project first suffered decades of delay and was then rushed through by Thaksin during his premiership between 2001 to 2006. The construction process was plagued by corruption scandals and claims of faulty design which seemed justified when cracks were discovered in its taxiways a month after the official opening on September 28, 2006.

Suvarnabhumi, or 'Golden Land,' as Marco Polo named South-east Asia in his famous travels, cost Thailand 3.9 billion dollars and about four decades to construct.

The project was born in the early 1970s when the government purchased 3,238 hectares for it in eastern Bangkok.