Over 110,000 people affected

Story & photos
by Garry Harbottle-Johnson

CHIANG MAI, Thailand – 16 August 2005 – Torrential rains lashed the mountainous centre of South East Asia on Saturday and led to flash floods in Northern Thailand’s popular tourist destinations.

Casualty estimates vary between 5 and 13 dead, with 11 to 20 reported missing, and around forty injured including two foreign visitors.  Eighteen roads, 44 bridges and around 6,500 hectares of agricultural crops have been severely affected in rural areas.

Current estimates are that floods have directly affected almost 111,000 people over an area the size of Wales, according to officials.

By mid-afternoon Saturday, the first flood and casualty reports were arriving with news that a 46-year-old woman, in the popular backpacker district of Pai, was washed away and drowned. In the same district, six tourists enjoying bamboo rafting were reported as missing and hopes fade, as they are still unlocated.

The floods surged downhill into other popular tourist destinations; to Chiang Dao, famous for its colourful hill tribe villagers and elephant camp, and to Mae Taeng, which boasts a world-renowned elephant conservation camp. Both areas reported casualties and severe flooding. In Mae Taeng, a car being pushed along in the floodwaters, killed a man.

Worst hit has been the major city of Chiang Mai, where the River Ping burst its banks in the worst flooding for 40 years.

Vast areas of south and east Chiang Mai City were underwater with tens of thousands left stranded in upper floors of their homes.

A resident of Wieng Ping district in Chiang Mai City shows the depth that water reached inside her home

In several shantytowns residents were forced to evacuate, as the waters became neck deep.

One eyewitness stated they had been enjoying the nightlife at 2am on Sunday morning and everything was normal. Yet, before dawn, the city’s famous Night Bazaar area was under a metre of water and hundreds of handicraft traders were called out to move their shop and stall contents to higher ground. In the lower floor of the main Night Bazaar building, over 100 shops were completely submerged, including the local DHL & UPS offices.

A stall holder at Chiangmai Night Bazaar peers into the flooded lower level of the main building

Throughout the affected area of the city, around 10,000 homes and several thousand businesses were flooded.

Seven major hotels and around twenty guest houses from the over 300 in the city were affected, but as one hotel staff member stated, everything in the tourist accommodation sector is expected to be back to normal by the coming weekend, “This is a temporary inconvenience, and provided the rains stay away for a few days, it will be a very short lived one”.

The retail and service business are not so fortunate. Many have insufficient, or no, insurance and have lost vast amounts of stock. Electrical equipment and furnishings in lower floors are ruined, and one auction company had over 100 used vehicles inundated forcing them to delay a forthcoming auction by over a month.

Government offices did not escape, with dozens of major buildings cut off. Several had basement document archives completely filled with water. The Provincial Police Headquarters, in south Chiang Mai, was still surrounded by over a metre of water, 36 hours after the initial flooding, and co-opted a nearby overpass as a staff car park (seriously disrupting traffic on the elevated inner ring road).

At least one hospital had to relocate patients after losing its electricity supply, and in the Nong Hoi district, staff and children at an orphanage were stranded in an upper floor for 24 hours.

Seven city schools have been closed until the waters recede.

The newly created archaeological park at Wieng Kum Kam has again been inundated in the manner that destroyed and buried this medieval city around 1530AD. Local historians have expressed concerns that many of the buildings excavated, since 2002, may be heavily damaged or destroyed in this flood, as protective restoration had variously not been started or completed.

Chiang Mai MP Pakorn Bura-nupakorn believed the flooding had caused more than one billion Baht (£14 million) in damages within the city limits alone. Chiang Mai Mayor, Boonlert Buranapakorn, agreed with this estimate.

A number of expatriate westerners believe the figure will be far higher despite little evidence of structural damage other than to the riverbanks.

Ad-hoc water taxis transport residents between home and navigable roads

The main force of water continues to flow in the river channel and in local canals and streambeds. Floodwater in urban lanes and land plots rise and fall, but are displaying slow horizontal travel, resulting in very little structural damage.

Tourists have been making the most of the phenomenon. Many have been taking the opportunity to get out and into the static floodwaters, stating that they had never experienced such events before and see it as a once in a lifetime photo opportunity.

Others joined in with relief efforts, or made use of the emergency services available, scrambling to get free rides on military vehicles brought in to ferry people through affected areas.

Local owners of 4WD vehicles take the opportunity to earn extra money as conventional taxis

Local residents, ever pragmatic, used four-wheel-drive vehicles as taxis, with fares inflated from the normal 20p to as much as £3.00 for short journeys.

Others made use of small boats to create water taxi services in roads where the water was not escaping due to high walls build around properties.

Motor mechanics set up ad-hoc workshops on raised land to dry and clean motorcycle engines and restore them to operation.

One road junction hawker continued selling bottles of drinking water to passing motorists, while standing knee-deep in the floods in front of a poster than declared “Welcome to Chiang Mai”.

At government level, the blame-game has started already, with peasant hill tribes receiving the brunt of the blame for forest encroachment and slash and burn farming techniques.

NGOs and minority group leaders have laid the blame of wealthy, and absentee, landowners converting huge tracts of “protected” forestry into fruit orchards.

Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra inspected the damage in his home province of Chiang Mai by helicopter yesterday (Tuesday). He has tasked Minister Newin Chidchob with immediately taking action against the hill tribes encroaching on forestry commission land, and stopping illegal logging – both are tasks that the government have regularly declared they have been doing over recent decades.

Upper Thailand’s protected forestry has shrunk by 5% in the last four years according to Preecha Waleepitakdech, Director of the Protected Forest Rehabilitation and Development Office under the Natural Resources and Environment Ministry. He agrees it is orchard creation rather than hill tribes and illegal logging that have caused the problems in the watershed.

At the Regional Community Forestry Training Centre, Permsak Makarapirom also dismissed ideas that hill tribes’ people destroy the forests, stating that the ethnic peoples are the “guardians of the forest” and have lived in them for centuries. Permsak blames government development projects and inappropriate agricultural policies as major causes of deforestation.

City dwellers believe that the Irrigation and Forestry Departments are to blame for ineffective policies, and have cited the routine opening of a nearby dam’s floodgate, at the peak of the city’s flooding, as one example of incorrect action that exacerbated the emergency.

One local stated that downtown Chiang Mai was quickly submerged due to faults in the flood warning system. Floodwater was released into the Ping River, instead of irrigation canals, after 20cm of rainfall. “Nobody wants to admit mistakes so the floods are blamed on illegal logging,” he said, “Irrigation officials released water from the Taeng river into the Ping instead of irrigation canals. They were scared that areas at the foot of Doi Suthep mountain would be flooded, like last year. This resulted in around 40 million cubic metres of water pouring into the Ping River”, he added.

PM Thaksin also said that illegal encroachment on the riverbanks, by property development, had contributed to river narrowing that forced the high water over the banks. Unusually, he frankly admitted that it was the wealthy classes that were to blame for this.

Mr. Thaksin is Thailand’s wealthiest businessman and founder of Shin Corp and its subsidiary AIS, which holds a virtual monopoly of Internet access and mobile telephone services within Thailand.

Opposition parties and government departments cite lack of interdepartmental cooperation as the cause of an ineffective disaster warning system, which bodes ill for Thailand’s budding tsunami warning system.

Somsak Suwansucharit, deputy chief of the Disaster Prevention and Mitigation Department, admitted, “Our department has the task of drawing up emergency plans, as well as giving instructions to various state agencies during a crisis, but nobody listens to us”.

Meanwhile in Chiang Mai, business operators and householders begin the tasks of returning to normal. Tourism industry leaders have asked foreign travel agents (and reporting media) to stress that this week’s emergency is a seasonal event. Whilst it may be the most severe in the last four decades, the effects will be mostly gone within the week, and long before the winter high season, everything will be back to normal they claim.

“Please emphasise to your customers and readers that there is no need to cancel their holiday plans”, requested one former industry association leader.

“We don’t want to suffer the same bankrupting cancellations that have afflicted Phuket”, said another business operator, “the Andaman Coast businesses are suffering far more damage from lack of customers than they ever received from the tsunami”, she confided, “We don’t want the same to happen in Chiang Mai”.

Inbound tourism in South East Asia has been repeatedly buffeted since the Millennium. The travel-cancelling events of 9-11, war in Afghanistan and Iraq, SARS, Avian Flu, and the tsunami, each depressed arrivals leading to severe financial hardships that continue throughout the region.