Pongphon Sarnsamak in AsiaOne News: Water and weather experts have expressed disappointment with the government's action in dealing with the flood situation - saying setting up sandbag walls and distributing flood relief bags to victims are not the way to overcome a flood crisis. "We cannot handle this crisis situation with normal measures," the deputy director of the Thai Meteorological Department (TMD), Somchai Baimuang, said.He was speaking at a roundtable discussion organised by Krungthep Turakij newspaper. Signs of impending flood crisis had been seen since March when heavy rain began falling in the suthern part of Thailand, while other regions faced cold weather even though March is the summer season.
"This was a 60-year extreme weather event which brought a large amount of rainfall over the country," he said. "Our agency told the Royal Irrigation Department [RID] in July, before tropical storm Nok-Ten hit the country, there would be abnormal weather this year, and the RID should treat this year's flood with crisis measures not just normal measures," he added.
Since early this year, Thailand has been hit by two tropical storms - Hai Ma and Nok-Ten. As a result, a lot of dams - especially big dams such as Bhumibol and Sirikit - were almost full from rainwater and had insufficient capacity to collect water when further heavy rain fell. At the same time, heavy rain was falling outside the dam area and causing floods in many areas. "There was no place for the water to go," he said....
A bamboo bridge over the Pai River in Thailand, shot by Tomjonescoaley, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license
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