By Daniel Ten Kate and Suttinee Yuvejwattana - Nov 7, 2011 12:00 AM GMT+0700
Thai floodwaters today will test barriers protecting two Bangkok industrial parks near the main international airport as a deluge that has swamped hundreds of factories over the past month courses through the capital.
A water mass north of Bangkok should reach Lat Krabang and Bang Chan industrial zones in the eastern part of the city, according to Jate Sopitpongstorn, a spokesman for the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration. The estates include a factory operated by Honda Motor Co., which abandoned its full-year profit forecast last week after another factory was flooded.
“The water will be there for sure,” Jate said by phone yesterday. “Lat Krabang has a high potential for flooding, but we hope the protection we put inside, 3 meters high, can protect and hold the water.”
The renewed threat to factories may worsen the impact of floods that have prompted the central bank to slash its 2011 economic growth forecast and disrupted global supply chains. Floodwaters edged closer to Bangkok’s central business district at the weekend, reaching the northernmost station on the city’s elevated rail system.
“The amount of water is massive,” Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra said after visiting a flooded district on the city’s outskirts yesterday. “It may take two to three weeks for the water to drain to the sea, so we are asking people to be patient.”
Floodwaters have already inundated seven industrial estates with 891 factories that employed about 460,000 people, according to the Thai Industrial Estate and Strategic Partners Association. Lat Krabang, 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) north of Suvarnabhumi airport, houses 231 factories employing 48,000 workers, including those operated by Unilever, Isuzu Motors Ltd. and Cadbury Plc.
Factories ‘At Risk’
“The enormous amount of water that you see still on the satellite maps north of Bangkok has to flow in one way or the other around the city,” said Adri Verwey, a specialist with Deltares, a Netherlands-based research institute, who is advising the government. “It will move on to a considerable depth around these estates. They are very much at risk.”
Suvarnabhumi and public transport links are still operating as normal. The airport’s perimeter is protected by a 3.5-meter- high dike, Airports of Thailand Pcl said last week.
The Thai capital is facing a dual threat from floodwaters from the north and angry residents intent on tearing down defensive walls, Yingluck said yesterday. The government finished the construction of a “big bag dike” consisting of large sandbags that should stem the flow of water into northern parts of the capital, she said.
Evacuations
“People still see water because we try to slow down its flow to make it drain through canals,” Yingluck said yesterday. “There are two main tasks now. First is managing water and the second is to take care of three million people who are affected.”
Waters more than a meter deep have moved south through Bangkok, forcing Yingluck last week to evacuate her flood operations command at Don Mueang airport, which sits on the city’s northern edge and mostly handles domestic flights. The government has ordered evacuations in 30 percent of the capital’s 50 districts, mostly northern, eastern and western areas.
City officials are aiming to halt the water’s advance at the Sam Sen canal, which runs just above Victory Monument, a major traffic intersection northeast of the city center and a stop on Bangkok’s elevated railway network known as the Skytrain, Jate said. The central business areas of Silom and lower Sukhumvit are protected by two canals where water can be drained out through the Chao Phraya river, he said.
‘Hope’
“We still have hope that the inner city central business district will not be affected at the moment,” Jate said.
The Bank of Thailand, which last month slashed its 2011 economic growth forecast to 2.6 percent from 4.1 percent, expects expansion to slow as the global economy weakens and the impact of the nation’s flood crisis increases, according to the minutes of its Oct. 19 meeting.
Rehabilitation efforts have begun in parts of Nakhon Sawan province and will start soon in Ayutthaya as flood waters recede, Yingluck said Nov. 5. The government has an initial budget of more than 100 billion baht ($3.3 billion) to help rebuild damaged areas, she said, adding that Cabinet will discuss new measures to help the economy recover on Nov. 8.
The disaster worsened last month, when rainfall about 40 percent more than the annual average filled dams north of Bangkok to capacity, prompting authorities to release more than 9 billion cubic meters of water down a river basin the size of Florida, with Bangkok at its southern tip.
Flooding this year has affected 64 of Thailand’s 77 provinces, damaging World Heritage-listed temples in Ayutthaya province, destroying 15 percent of the nation’s rice crop and flooding the homes of almost 15 percent of the country’s 67 million people, according to government data.
To contact the reporters on this story: Daniel Ten Kate in Bangkok at dtenkate@bloomberg.net; Suttinee Yuvejwattana in Bangkok at suttinee1@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Paul Tighe at ptighe@bloomberg.net
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