Water, water everywhere - Part II

Hold on to your seats, it’s coming!

The much anticipated huge volume of water is really here in town.  It’s fascinating to see photos of river-like highways, runways, water-covered houses, stores, factories, temple…  It really doesn’t discriminate the victims, you can give it credit for that.  The expensive estates, the PM and ministers’ homes, the water expert’s house, the princess’s palace, temples, shacks are all flooded at this point.

Try our best to get through water
Photo: Pichet Suksai

After weeks of anticipation and preparation, the chaos still shakes us all up.  The netizens (those who can’t live without the internet) tend to be most well informed on what to do and what not to do.  I said they are informed, I didn’t say they practice the precaution.  It’s just hard for some to believe that such misfortune will happen to them too.  You can call it denial syndrome, like in any life mishaps. 

Nothing is like waking up with knee-deep water in your home to snap you out of this illusion.

I have asked myself what impact has the flood has on me, and here are my answers:

As a Bangkok resident:

1) I pay more attention to the TV news, the media which I rarely watched- monitoring for breaking news, etc.  I found this informative but also nerve wrecking after a week.  I watched after announcers and commentators go over again and again the so many million cubic meter of water coming passing such and such places (most of which I have not heard of in my life), the water height is so many centimeters from the sea level (so what?) and the flow is at such and such rate.  The analyses are done by experts from various institutes and offices presenting such and such models.  These reports are bad enough to make anyone crazy, but when I start watching announcements by the top guys, FROC heads, BMA governor and, last and also worst, our lady PM, my anxiety turns into full-blown panic.

It’s not the situation they describe or contents of their talks, it’s the realization that they have no idea what’s going on and keep contradicting each other.  For goodness sake, they don’t even work together in unison and yes, no one is really in charge of this whole bloody flood thing in Thailand.  We are on our own, folks.  If you don’t already figure that out, let me tell you here and now.

2) I’m more involved in the social media since the beginning of this flood.  This I can do it on my own time- particularly convenient with my iPad in bed.  This gives me insomnia, as anyone sensible may expect, particularly when I wake up at 2:30 am. Instead of going back to sleep, I turning on my iPad, and start checking news and chatting away on facebook.  Addiction phase one, I’m afraid.

3) I rarely read print newspaper any more, as it only comes once a day.  So, by the time it reaches me, it is be old news- particularly with the new delivery guy in our neighborhood.  I check out the news on the paper websites a few times a day, and am very happy with that.  In fact, I cancelled my two print daily subscriptions.  Actually, I’m a bit guilty about this, since we are also a print magazine publisher.  And I have to admit, at crisis like this, print is no match to online. But I still miss my daily comics and puzzles, which I can find online, but I do like to work on it on my couch over coffee.  Ah, the good old days…

4) Roads are less crowded.  This is partly because schools are off and more importantly, cars are parked and stored away from the flood in any conceivable high places.  These include parking lots in condos, shopping centers and even on highways and express ways.  The last two make me a bit nervous.  In case of emergency, we may all be stuck in Bangkok for months because the roads are flooded and the express ways are all blocked by parked cars.  In a way, it is not too different from get stuck in a house with iron bars on windows in the case of fire.  We’d be stuck on streets with water coming in a huge traffic because we can’t use highways- which are all blocked by parked cars.  OK, maybe I have watched too many Hollywood movies, but it’s still a dangerous practice to me- not unlike storing things on fire stairs.

5) Like most people at this stage, I look for stuffs I rarely buy when I shop.  These include bottled water, garbage bags (we normally reuse grocery store white plastic bags for garbage), instant noodles- trying to follow instructions we learn from all sources on TV or the net.  I even bought boots!!!  However, we instead end up buying dozens of peanuts, potato chips and all the munchies and boil our own filtered water for drinking.  (I don’t trust the water supply of the drinking water producers either.)  I was going stock up with beer but changed my mind.  I hate to look drunk while evacuating in case of emergency.  You can drown in knee-deep water you know, if you are drunk enough.  Besides, we are too tensed up to enjoy drinking at this stage.  That will be a waste of good beer, don’t you think?

Daily activity of people in Bangkok and Suburbs
Photo: Pichet Suksai

What will this flood turn me into, I wonder?  It sure will have a lasting impact on me, like anyone else who experience it, I’m quite certain.  Since it’s not over, we can’t really tell now.  But six months from now, I’ll write about the effect on me and the ones I see around me.  That will be interesting.

One thing for sure, we’ll all be very broke.  And, last but not least, I bet we’ll look at working toilets in our homes in a way we can’t image even now.

View Part I