Bangkok breathed easier yesterday as barriers protecting the capital from Thailand’s worst flooding in decades held firm, but authorities ordered a new evacuation north of the city where floodwaters breached defenses of an industrial park.
The nationwide death toll rose to 307, mostly from drowning. Outside the capital, thousands of people remain displaced and hungry residents were struggling to survive in half-submerged towns. On Sunday, the military rescued terrified civilians from the rooftops of flooded buildings in the swamped city of Ayutthaya, one of the country’s hardest-hit.
At the same time, officials were expressing growing optimism that Bangkok would be spared thanks to the capital’s complex system of floodwalls, canals, dikes and underground tunnels that help divert vast pools of runoff south into the Gulf of Thailand.
The Flood Relief Operation Center yesterday ordered all factories at the Nava Nakorn industrial estate in Pathum Thani Province just north of Bangkok to halt work and prepare their workers for evacuation.
The center said there were up to 20,000 people in and around the site, which houses more than 200 factories for both local and international firms.
The order was issued in a live television broadcast after water started to break through makeshift barriers erected the past few days at the estate, which was founded in 1971.
The flood center’s spokesman, Wim Rungwattanajinda, said 200 buses and trucks were ready to take evacuated workers to emergency shelters, including a huge temple complex belonging to the Dhammakaya Buddhist sect that could house as many as 5,000.
At least four other major industrial parks have been inundated, leaving tens of thousands of workers idle and disrupting supply chains, especially in the automotive and electronic industries.
Meanwhile, officials said the economic cost of the disaster would likely be worse than first feared.
Thai Finance Minister Thirachai Phuvanatnaranubala said the floods across the country were likely to cut economic growth this year by around 1 to 1.7 percentage points, according to estimates from the Bank of Thailand and the National Economic and Social Development Board.
“The figure is not clear yet but it is likely to be higher than we estimated before,” he said.
The previous estimate was 0.9 percent.
Forecasters at the University of the Thai Chamber of Commerce have estimated the cost of the floods to the Thai economy at about 150 billion baht (US$4.9 billion), about 1.3 to 1.5 percent of annual GDP.
“We will find healing measures for the economy after the flood recedes,” Thai Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra said.
Speaking at the disaster response headquarters at Don Muang Airport in Bangkok, Yingluck apologized for authorities’ inability to protect Nava Nakorn.
Yingluck has asked the country’s military to take charge of the emergency response in five of the kingdom’s worst-hit provinces, including Ayutthaya, which has been under water for over a week.
Thai authorities said water levels were receding in Ayutthaya, which lies about 80km upriver of Bangkok and has seen its ancient World Heritage temples and all five of its industrial estates swamped.
Thai Agriculture minister Theera Wongsamut on Sunday said there were “good signs” that the situation would improve after a large amount of run-off water from the north flowed past Bangkok to the Gulf of Thailand on Saturday.
He added that water levels would be “stable” from now on, easing fears over a seasonal high tide that will make it harder for water to flow out to sea.
The next high tide period will be between Oct. 28 and Oct. 30, officials said.
However, irrigation department director general Chalit Damrongsak said the situation remained critical as water from low-lying areas north of Bangkok still needed to drain to the sea.
“It is not over,” he said when asked about the crisis.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
China would train thousands of foreign law enforcement officers to see the world order “develop in a more fair, reasonable and efficient direction,” its minister for public security has said. “We will [also] send police consultants to countries in need to conduct training to help them quickly and effectively improve their law enforcement capabilities,” Chinese Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong (王小洪) told an annual global security forum. Wang made the announcement in the eastern city of Lianyungang on Monday in front of law enforcement representatives from 122 countries, regions and international organizations such as Interpol. The forum is part of ongoing