November 2, 2011
by Gavin Tritt
Re-posted from The Asia Foundation’s In Asia blog.
While international media attention has been focused on the rising floodwaters in and around Bangkok, and Thailand’s efforts to cope with this disaster, across the border, Cambodia has been experiencing its worst flooding in a decade. Starting more than two months ago, rapidly rising rivers have inundated the country’s lowland rice-growing areas, leaving at least 247 people dead, an estimated 1.5 million people displaced or otherwise affected, more than 230,000 hectares of rice paddy destroyed, and 400,000 hectares still under water. [Read more...]

November 2, 2011
Re-posted from The Asia Foundation’s In Asia blog.

Several weeks of the worst flooding Thailand has experienced in 50 years has left more than 400 people dead and affected over 9 million Thais. Although central Bangkok has been spared thus far, many neighborhoods in greater Bangkok and adjacent provinces remain submerged. The country faces economic losses and recovery costs in the billions, and concerns about health and other consequences of the flooding are rising. In Asia interviewed The Asia Foundation’s country representative in Thailand and Bangkok resident Kim McQuay on these and other issues.

It would appear that central Bangkok has been spared the flooding that has devastated communities to the north and west. How are Bangkok’s residents reacting? [Read more...]

October 27, 2011
IRIN reports that Bangkok is bracing for an inescapable disaster as 400 million cubic meters of water rushes into every part of Thailand’s capital city.

IRIN reports that “The size of the population – more than eight million residents – coupled with the run-off, has made for an unprecedented and atypical emergency, said Kirsten Mildren, information officer for Southeast Asia at the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), who has worked in disasters for almost a decade.

“I cannot think of another emergency where I have seen it like this, where you have got the authorities and emergency services really battling to get the water to move around a city of this size. It is really incredible.”

Click here to read the complete story.

October 21, 2011
According the New York Times, Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra said Friday that she would take direct command of flood control in Thailand as Bangkok took the risky step of opening its floodgates and as criticism of the government mounted after days of disorganization and conflicting messages. Click here for the full story at the New York Times.

By Kim McQuay; Reposted with permission from In Asia.
For the last several days, the water level in Bangkok’s Chao Phraya River has been rising in virtual synch with the escalating worry that grips a city bisected by this great river and whose neighborhoods are crisscrossed by dozens of canals, or klongs. This growing concern drew me to the Chao Phraya, whose familiar defined banks had vanished beneath a broad expanse of water that lapped at the window frames of traditional wooden houses that ordinarily sit some distance from the river. Sunlight danced across the swollen river, the quiet scene otherwise offering little clue that communities a few kilometers upriver were contending with the most severe flooding in half a century. [Read more...]