Thai floods force closure of 17 factories in industrial zone

Amy Sawitta Lefevre in Reuters: Seventeen factories were temporarily shut on Monday in a major Thai industrial zone dominated by foreign companies, after flood waters blocked nearby roads, a senior official said.

But the official did not identify the stricken plants at the Amata Nakorn Industrial Estate, a sprawling manufacturing zone home to more than 500 factories, located 114 km (71 miles) east of the capital, Bangkok.

The 17 factories were shut after the workers proved unable to reach them and the navy has been asked to help pump out the water, Wibun Krommadit, Amata's chief marketing officer, said in a statement. "There is flood water outside the premises and on some surrounding roads, blocking entry for workers who are unable to easily get to work," Wibun said.

Nearly half the factories in the industrial estate are operated by Japanese firms. Floods have spread across more than half of Thailand's provinces this year, but the government has ruled out any repeat of the devastating floods of late 2011.

Those floods were the worst in half a century and caused massive disruption to industry and global supply chains, slashing economic growth to just 0.1 percent in 2011....

October, 2011 flooding in Thailand, shot by DANIEL JULIE, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license