Bangkok has reached its limits. With about 40 people dead and a disaster declared in all 50 of the city's districts, floods have turned entire neighbourhoods not into rivers, as is common during the rainy season, but into stagnant lakes.
Parts of the city received about 300 millimetres of rain — equivalent to half London's annual rainfall — in about two days. These were not the usual afternoon downpours that temporarily flood streets and send rats and cockroaches seeking shelter in trees and buildings. The rain was continuous, “all day, all night”, says Suleemas Kurangkul, a 73-year-old resident whose second-floor flat is above the waterline, but whose ground-floor stairs remain submerged.
According to the government, about 40 people have died in flood-related incidents. Some deaths were caused by drowning and several by electrocution, while thousands of people are staying in more than 230 shelters across the city. By the time the warning reached mobile phones, the water in the streets was already waist-deep.
The Khlong Chan apartment complex, built in the 1970s in northeastern Bangkok, has become a symbol of the disaster. Photographs shared across Thailand show the multistorey buildings rising above brown water, with the roofs of parked cars barely visible above the surface. “People were so happy to see the sun,” Suleemas says, “but the smell is getting stronger. So much debris and rubbish is floating everywhere.”
Bangkok, a metropolis of millions of people, was built on the vast floodplain of the Chao Phraya river and relies on a network of muddy canals for drainage, combined with pumping stations and embankments. However, concrete construction has destroyed much of the canal network, leaving the city unable to handle this volume of water. The drainage canals can handle about 60 millimetres of rain an hour, rising to 80 in upgraded sections, but local bursts of rain exceeded those limits, leaving insufficient time between periods of strain.
The floods have also disrupted the main airport, Suvarnabhumi, where about half of Thai Airways staff were unable to get to work at one point this week, causing a backlog of thousands of bags and flight cancellations. Many schools have closed, and much of the capital is gridlocked. In some neighbourhoods, scenes have been described as dystopian: people are using inflatable pools or even a floating refrigerator as boats to reach their homes, while one man was arrested for riding a jet ski along a main road.
Thailand's prime minister, Anutin Charnvirakul, told reporters that the Bangkok metropolitan area remains at risk from floodwater arriving from the north, and that an “operations centre” has been set up to monitor the situation. Thailand's meteorological service forecasts more heavy rain for the coming week.
The disaster is part of a broader pattern that appears to be taking hold in the region. Scientists say southeast Asia has already seen extreme flooding worsen, a trend set to intensify as greenhouse gases warm the planet further. Warm seas evaporate more water, and warmer air can hold more moisture, allowing storms to unleash much more intense rainfall. “In central Thailand, I already see a small but significant trend towards extreme rainfall on my maps,” says Nikolaos Skliris, an ocean scientist at the University of Southampton, adding that “in the long term, all the models show this will intensify — more rain and more extreme rain”.
The picture is complicated by the emergence of an unusually strong El Niño, a cyclical weather pattern that brings record heat and more violent extremes worldwide. Its presence usually leads to drier summer conditions in southeast Asia, but recent research shows that it still makes days of extreme rainfall worse.
According to consultant Naim Laeni, co-author of a study on Bangkok's flood resilience, “the government did not communicate the severity”. As he points out, “in Bangkok, we usually get heavy rain for a few hours, not for days”.
Neighbouring Myanmar has been hit by the same weather system, with flash floods and blocked roads hampering rescue operations. Rescuers recovered bodies from a landslide that destroyed the village of Ka Det Nge Htein in the south of the country, leaving nine dead, while eight people are missing beneath the mud in another village. The civil war and the junta's restrictions on the media have made gathering information and providing aid difficult.
Back in Bangkok, pumping stations are operating at full capacity, but it will take days for the water to drain completely. Despite the disaster, residents are showing resilience.
Suleemas says she will stay in her flat with her neighbours. “It is difficult, yes, very difficult,” she says. “But together we struggle and endure. When we come together to help one another like this, our spirit can keep us standing; we can get through everything together.”
A 55-year-old resident, Chaleerat Chamrasporn, sees the experience as a lesson: “Children study disasters, so now they can see what the ‘end of the world’ really looks like, or rather, that this is only the beginning.”
The picture that emerges is clear: Bangkok, built on a floodplain with much of its canal network destroyed by concrete, may find it increasingly difficult to manage the challenges of a changing climate.
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