Industry alarm over worsening Thai floods

Space Daily via AFP: Soldiers plucked stranded homeowners from chest-deep water and floods threatened major manufacturing plants in central Thailand as international firms raised alarm over authorities' ability to handle the inundations.

Heavy rains have swept the kingdom in recent days, with the worst of the flooding concentrated in central and eastern provinces where international factories have been waterlogged in a development that has raised parallels with devastating inundations two years ago.

"We have not received any help from the government -- we are disappointed with them," said a member of the management team at a subsidiary of Japanese electronics and auto giant Mitsubishi, whose plant at in Chonburi province's Amata Nakorn Industrial Estate is one of several surrounded by water.

"We cannot calculate the losses right now," she told AFP, asking not to be named, but added that the factory had been shuttered for three days and some 800 employees had been sent home on full pay....

Image from a November, 2011 flood in Thailand, shot by DANIEL JULIE, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license