From the window of my apartment, the world looks well enough. For now, bright sun on the roofs of houses to my right, a line of clothes strung up on a neighbor’s balcony, a blue sky, clouds. The people from the shanty down below are bathing again, a daily ritual in which water from a yellow bucket pours across their backs and shoulders. An elderly woman in the corner of the lot harvests something green from a patch of weeds and concrete. I wonder what it is, if she can eat it. From here, eight stories above the world and safe in my apartment, I can even hear the street dogs barking back and forth between themselves four blocks down, a distant conversation, constant and somehow reassuring. This is the scene I wake up to everyday in Bangkok, even when it’s flooding. In other places, not more than twenty minutes from here, the streets are rivers filled with garbage, abandoned animals, the rain.
The problem is my city is about to become an island, and there doesn’t seem to be anything that anyone can do about it. Cutting directly through the heart of Bangkok, the Chao Phraya River, one of the country’s major water ways, is also the river into which the majority of Thailand’s northern rivers empty. Given the incredible flooding in the north this last rainy season, the cresting of the Chao Phraya has now become the problem of the central provinces, mine in particular, home to about 10 million people, many now without their homes. We are pressed between the mountains from which the northern rivers flow and the ocean below us to which they’re drawn, a flat and incredibly populated expanse of land and city which hasn’t seen this kind of water in over fifty years.
For the last week or so, the messages coming from the news and from the government have been pretty mixed, half assuring us of their control over the situation, half retracting that assurance and telling us to ready for the worst. Currently, especially in districts nearest the river, there are people and places that are thoroughly and utterly in trouble. I think about three hundred or so have died so far, but I can’t be certain. So little is for certain. I do know that evacuation centers have been set up, but, unfortunately, some of these have already had to be evacuated. Similarly, the FORC, the government organization in charge of dealing with the flood, currently operates out of the Don Mueang airport and are quickly being surrounded by water at their headquarters. The international airport, so far, continues to operate, though the majority of flights out of the city have all been booked.
The worst case scenario is that all three major defensive positions at the city’s northern edge fail and do so utterly. Every day they reinforce these walls with sandbags, but an article I read this morning warned that the country was quickly running out of sand. Kids across the country have even started digging up the fields where they play soccer, bagging up the ground to make a wall of earth that all of us pray to god can hold. If it doesn’t, the water, which has been building slowly for the last few weeks, will over-wash the capital in an estimated 5 feet of water, last for about a month. The flatness of the landscape makes the drainage of water incredibly slow, which is good in a way because it allows a more sustained attempt at holding the water back, but should that attempt fail, it means the water is here to stay. The prime minister said today there is about a 50/50 chance of slowing down the water long enough for people to be prepared. The goal, I think, is to control the amount of water so no single area gets hit all at once. The idea is to disperse the water slowly, spread it out. But if the water does suddenly get through, and if it stays, at that point I don’t know what happens to Bangkok, or to the country for that matter which relies heavily on its capital as the financial epicenter of its economy. If the walls to the north go down, I will probably have to leave. Granted, if they go down, I probably won’t be able to, so, well, I don’t know then. I really don’t.
What I do know is that now that Riley’s back in Chaing Rai, I’m here alone, for the next week at least. They’re building an impromptu brick and mortar wall around my building, about five feet high and reinforced with sandbags, so hopefully that does the trick. Also, I think we have a generator, so I should be fine. Although the government recently declared an emergency “holiday” so businesses have an excuse to close and people can evacuate, there is a shortage of ways to leave. Planes and buses have all been booked, and I don’t have a car. At the moment, I have enough food and water to last me about two weeks, but I hope it doesn’t come to that. Also, next Wednesday I leave on a flight out of Bangkok to India. There, I will take refuge with Kelli for two weeks traveling. I pray that by the time we return, the world, or at least my portion of it, is still alive, afloat and breathing. I love this city very much. I want her to remain.
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