Thai Floods

[Torurot]

Some of you guys on the ground might have some pictures and personal observations?? It's a hell of a lot of water

Sony Electronics, along with all the new camera models stopped

Sony under water - Much of the Sony facility in Bangkadi Industrial Estate in Pathum Thani€™s Muang district lies submerged. The flood waters are about 3 metres high. PATTARACHAI PREECHAPANICH

http://www.bangkokpost.com/news....t-b30bn

Bangkadi, home to mostly electronics and electrical appliance manufacturers, is the seventh industrial site to have succumbed to the surging waters.

It houses 47 factories including those of Toshiba and Sony.

"The initial damage is estimated at 30 billion baht. It will take about a month for the floodwaters to recede and then at least three months to rehabilitate the park," said Thawatchai Ung-ampornpilai, the mayor of Bangkadi municipality.

Mr Thawatchai said the floodwaters are almost 4 metres deep in certain parts of the site, making it impassible to all vehicles.

The industrial park had tried to hold back the water for days but the efforts failed on Thursday night when a floodwall was breached after a massive volume of water overflowed from the Prapa canal.

"The water level in the Prapa canal rose very high and it overflowed the dyke. After that the dyke broke.

"We tried to fix it but it was just impossible," said the mayor, who was about to leave the site when the breach occurred.

"As I sped off I saw the flood bring down pylons. Luckily no one was injured," he said. It was reported that a large number of staff were trapped inside when the flood gushed in.

About 500 personnel from the army, navy and border patrol police as well as local authorities were yesterday mobilised to evacuate the remaining people from the industrial park.

The evacuation was completed yesterday evening.

"The floodwater came in so fast that we didn't have time to run and it was incredibly high," said a worker who was with the last batch of people to be evacuated.

After the evacuation, soldiers will set up a make-shift unit there to guard the premises.

Mr Thawatchai said authorities were drafting a plan for how to salvage the industrial park.

Under the initial plan, the floodwater would be diverted to Khlong Bang Ngiew, to Khlong Chiang Rak and then to the Chao Phraya River.

In Pathum Thani's Thanyaburi district, chaos descended on a community at Rangsit market which was under water one metre deep.

While people were evacuating, a group of people with spades tried to break the earthen dyke in the hope that it would reduce the water level in the community.

On the outbound lane of Phahon Yothin road heading to the North, police set up roadblocks to prevent small vehicles from passing through due to the high level of the floodwaters.

Many motorists decided to park their vehicles on the flyover across the Rangsit canal and on the elevated tollway.

From http://www.sonyalpharumors.com/

This is the very first picture of the flood that hit the Sony factory in Thailand (Source: Bangkokpost). And the mayor of the Bankadi municipality said that: €œIt will take about a month for the floodwaters to recede and then at least three months to rehabilitate the park€œ. Sony didn€™t officially release a statement about the current situation in Thailand. What I heard from my sources is that the Sony NEX-7 production will be moved to other factories. But also that will not be a quick process.

[TEXASMAC]

The world economy sinks farther.

[pacman]

     Another nail you think?

And on the TV today I heard that 2/3 of Thailand is now under water. That's a lot of water that's going to take a long time to drain. Too bad if more heavy rain comes...      

And on a related website, there's mention of 14,000 factories that have been affected by flood waters & can't open. WTF!! I thought they numbered in the 100's not 14,000 of the bloody things.

I see the baht has started falling, we might finish up with something positive out of this yet...        

[farangbah]

(Tomcat @ Oct. 18 2011,23:23) In the 20 odd years i been coming here around once a year there is some kind of problem...Mil Coup, Airport snowed in or Volcanic ash , bombs, red shirts, Tsunami, fire, and now flood... im usually caught up in it somewhere.

I lived in Manhattan during September 11th, I lived in Japan during the recent great quake/tsunami/nuclear meltdown, I went back to New York this summer just in time for Hurricane Irene, and now I just moved to Bangkok a month ago.

I think I'm the fookin jinx...

[farangbah]

PS -- Sukhumvit is still dry at present. Spent the past two days on buses, and most routes below and east of BKK are still open.

But people are starting to build more serious walls around their store fronts...

[TEXASMAC]

I dont wish to be thought of a person who takes advantages of others but ... come the end of January with the shortage of monger business due to the floods, I should really be a handsum man at the get together.

[BlueBallz]

You know what texas?? That happens, to a certain extent, at the end of every month!!!

[Tomcat]

One of my LB friends phone and said the water is in Chinatown now

[TEXASMAC]

BB, called rent??

[BlueBallz]

Rent due-PRECISELY!!!

[Torurot]

Inside WD's Hard Drive flooded Thai factory

http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2011/10/27/wd_flooded_factory/

Hard drive maker is wet wet wet...

Pictures at the link

[BAM]

The prices of hard drives has skyrocketed the past week and are still going up.

60% on the worlds supply of drives comes from Thailand.

[Harry Lime]

Why the mad migration of parts for your iPhone matters

By David Pilling Financial Times - 27 October 2011


Much of Thailand is under water. In March, Japan€™s coast was battered by the most devastating tsunami in 1,000 years. These are, above all, human tragedies. At least 366 people have already died in Thailand. In Japan, some 20,000 people are dead or missing. But as well as the fragility of human life, the disasters have revealed something rather more prosaic: the vulnerability and astonishing complexity of the global supply chain.

This week, Mazda, Toyota and Toshiba became the latest in a long list of international companies, mostly Japanese, to extend production shutdowns at flooded Thai factories. Honda€™s Thai assembly plant, where it churns out nearly 250,000 cars a year, or 5 per cent of its global output, has been shut since October 4. Disruption goes well beyond simple assembly. Asia€™s extraordinarily complex supply chain means materials cross multiple borders on their way to the store.


There€™s a revealing story in Gordon Mathews€™ Ghetto at the Center of the World, a book about Chunking Mansions, the doss-house-cum-trading hub in Hong Kong. In one example of low-end globalisation, Australian opals are shipped, via Chunking Mansions, to southern China where they are polished, sent back to Australia and sold as souvenirs to Chinese tourists.

If something as straightforward as an opal can make such a circuitous journey, imagine what goes on with sophisticated electronics. Apple€™s gadgets, such as the iPad and iPhone, are produced in southern China in a factory owned by Taiwan€™s Hon Hai. But inside each shiny product are dozens of components made in Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, the US and Europe. These wing their way around the world like deranged migratory birds.

At its best, this complexity serves to raise the quality and bring down the cost of each part, and hence that of the final product, by ensuring it is made in the best location. But such a tangled chain is prone to strain, particularly when it is paired with the just-in-time practices pioneered by Japan. Just as banks sought to become more profitable by reducing their capital to an absolute minimum, so companies seek to cut their inventory to a minimum.

It takes a crisis for the inner workings of the supply chain to come to light. Before the March tsunami, even most Japanese were unaware that the Tohoku region produced anything other than rice and fish. It turned out that several essential components were made there, including 40 per cent of the world€™s microcontrollers at a factory owned by Renesas. These days, few cars can run without at least 50 of these €œlittle brains€. When the Renesas plant was knocked out, car production was temporarily halted in several factories around the world.

Japanese companies did a remarkable job at getting Renesas and others back up and running. Yet the disruption has unsettled buyers. Daiki Takeyama, technology analyst at Goldman Sachs in Tokyo, says customers are pressing Japanese suppliers to move some production out of Japan. That would make the supply chain even more complex.

Thai floods are also having a disruptive effect. Honda Motor stopped production in Malaysia due to a lack of parts from Thailand. The computer industry is braced for a shortage of hard-disk drives after Thai factories were flooded.

The floods have washed up a third revelation. Almost nothing could be made these days without Asian parts. Greg Sutch of Intralink, a UK technology consultancy, says US and European manufacturers would struggle to match Asian producers of some parts even if they wanted to. He cites capacitors and connectors, without which much of the modern world would grind to a halt.

Ippei Takeda, chief executive of Nichicon, a Kyoto-based supplier of capacitors, recently told me that to produce an aluminium capacitor you need to make holes one micron deep in a sheet of aluminium 100 microns thick. One should imagine, he said, drilling 300,000 holes into a grain of Japanese rice, flipping it over and then doing the same on the other side. The point is that it€™s not easy to make sophisticated components. The barriers to entry are high. Specialisation means that, once manufacturing has gone to Asia, it is very hard for US or European manufacturers to claw back.

That could have important long-term implications. Apple is rightly lauded for outsmarting Sony, the Japanese electronics pioneer that was unable to make the imaginative leap from analogue Walkman to digital MP3 player. Yet Apple could not make its products without the Asian components nestled inside. South Korea€™s Samsung, for example, supplies the microchips that run the iPad and iPhone. Yet the two are also competitors €“ as well as legal sparring partners €“ following the launch of Samsung€™s Galaxy smartphone and Galaxy Tab. The Galaxy phone, in particular, has outperformed expectations, grabbing 10 per cent of the global smartphone market. Taiwan€™s HTC, too, has done well. Even Chinese manufacturers ZTE and Huawei are making inroads into the handset market using Google€™s Android software.

Many Asian manufacturers simply make components. But some that supply parts to their branded competitors aspire to inventing the next breakthrough device. It€™s certainly not easy. But so long as Asian companies are making many of the components inside everything we use, even Apple cannot relax.

[Torurot]

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=76282
It would be easy to assume, at first glance, that the watery rectangle in the center of this image is a harbor. Narrow structures extend into the blue water like docks; small white dots break up field of blue like ships on water; and the structures lining the area resemble large warehouses.

But on closer inspection, it becomes clear that the white dots are airplanes, and that the watery rectangle is the submerged runway complex of the Don Muang Airport. Located north of downtown Bangkok, the airport is in one of 31 districts affected by flooding in the Thai capital. All 50 districts remain under threat, according to local officials.

The Advanced Land Imager (ALI) on NASA€™s Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) satellite took this image of Bangkok on October 29, 2011. Flooding is most obvious at the airport, but much of the area in the image is flooded. The spaces between buildings and under trees are blue. Signs of flooding are also evident throughout the large image, which includes a much wider area.

The floods started in late July as unusually heavy monsoon rains and a tropical cyclone inundated Thailand. Floods swelled rivers and filled reservoirs throughout the country. By late October, the floods reached Bangkok through the Chao Phraya River and numerous canals and smaller waterways. As of October 30, the floods had claimed 373 lives and affected more than two million people, said the government of Thailand.

The Don Muang Airport (also Don Mueang) started to flood on October 25 during a period of high tides. Even as floods were draining into the Gulf of Thailand on Bangkok€™s southern shores, high tides pushed back, amplifying the floods. The Chao Phraya reached record levels on October 25, and floods spread across parts of Bangkok. The high tides have peaked, and water levels on the Chao Phraya have dropped slightly. Low tides in the coming days (November 3-15) will give the city time to drain standing floods and prepare for the next high tide, said Thailand€™s Flood Relief Operating Center.

The Don Muang Airport, a domestic airport, stopped operations after the runways flooded on October 25. However, the building housed the Flood Relief Operating Center and some 4,000 flood evacuees. The evacuees were forced to leave on October 25, and the Flood Relief Operating Center moved on October 29 when the building flooded. The airplanes shown in the image were decommissioned before the flood. Bangkok€™s primary airport, Suvarnabhumi, is still operating and is expected to stay dry.

References
24/7 Emergency Operation Center for Flood, Storm and Landslide. (2011, October 24). Flood situation reports. Accessed November 1, 2011.
Bangkok Post. (2011, November 1). All districts in Bangkok still €˜at risk.€™ Accessed November 1, 2011.
Bangkok Post. (2011, October 26). Chao Phraya on the brink. Accessed November 1, 2011.
Don Muang Airport Guide. (2011, October 25). Don Muang Airport temporarily closed due to floods. Accessed November 1, 2011.
Government of Thailand. (2011, November 1). Announcement on flooding situation in Bangkok. Published on ReliefWeb. Accessed November 1, 2011.
Government of Thailand. (2011, November 1). FROC: Overall flood situation has improved. Published on ReliefWeb. Accessed November 1, 2011.
Government of Thailand. (2011, October 30). Floods kill 373, affect 2 mil. Published on ReliefWeb. Accessed November 1, 2011.
The Nation. (2011, November 2). Suvarnabhumi €˜will be safe.€™ Accessed November 1, 2011, 5:30 EDT).
Poomhirun, C., Prasertpolkrung, J., Hoonsara, S. (2011, October 30). FROC forced to move from Don Mueang. The Nation. Accessed November 1, 2011.
The Nation. (n.d.) What can be expected. Accessed November 1, 2011.

NASA Earth Observatory image created by Jesse Allen and Robert Simmon, using EO-1 ALI data provided courtesy of the NASA EO-1 team. Caption by Holli Riebeek.

Instrument:
EO-1 - ALI

[Torurot]

Trash, sewage boost disease risk in Bangkok floods
MARGIE MASON - AP Medical Writer | AP

BANGKOK, Thailand (AP) €” Rancid brown water licks at Samroeng Verravanich's thighs as he wades through one of Bangkok's many flooded streets. The garbageman plunges a white-gloved hand into the filth, fishes out a slimy plastic bag and slings it into the red basket he's towing.

"If you have cuts, it can create infections between your fingers," Samroeng says of the dirty water, holding out a dripping hand peppered with a red rash. "My hands got infected. It hurts and it spreads too €” like a virus."

As Thailand's worst floods in more than half a century continue to creep into Bangkok, mixing with water bubbling up through drains and spilling over canals, many streets have become floating landfills. Plastic bags overflowing with waste and rotten food cling to boats, cars, motorbikes and people as they slowly snake through inundated roadways. Raw sewage and animal carcasses can be seen bobbing in waters ripe for disease.

No major outbreaks have been reported since monster monsoon rains spawned floods that began swallowing areas north of the capital in August. But experts warn the biggest health threats will likely emerge in the coming weeks after moving floodwaters subside, leaving stale pools.

"There's a lot of danger around it," says Mark Thomas, a spokesman for UNICEF, which is assisting with sanitation issues. "You need to keep kids out of the water, and everybody should stay out of the water as much as possible."

Mosquito-borne diseases, such as dengue fever, are a concern as well as eye infections and waterborne ailments that can lead to diarrhea and severe dehydration.

Skin diseases and fungal infections are the flood's biggest plague so far, with nearly 100,000 cases of athlete's foot reported. Bouts of diarrhea and respiratory infections are also common, especially with many flood victims sheltering in hot, cramped sites that may not have electricity or clean water.

Some 110,000 people have been displaced and more than 400 killed, mostly from drowning, since the waters started inundating millions of farm acres before seeping into Bangkok on their way to the sea.

Many submerged homes no longer have running water or working toilets, forcing remaining residents to bathe and defecate in the open, often in waters surrounding their homes. That waste can be spread into water where children play.

"We all know the risk is there," says Dr. Maureen Birmingham, World Health Organization country representative in Thailand. "People get water in their mouths that's contaminated with feces, and all the diseases that can ensue from that €” that's probably the biggest concern."

Since garbage trucks can no longer reach many hard-hit areas, brigades of trash collectors have started doing the work in boats or on foot.

On the same street where Samroeng and a colleague cleared rubbish in the northwestern Bangkok district of Bang Plad, 9-year-old Paradorn Junsamlee practiced swimming behind his mom. He smiled and plopped his chubby bottom down on the pavement with a splash, saying he had taken medicine to protect against disease in the floodwaters.

"I'm worried about him getting sick, but you can't stop him," says mother Nantana Junsamlee, a soaked T-shirt and shorts sucked against her skin. "I tell him, 'Every time you swim, you have to avoid getting water in your eyes and mouth.'"

At a Buddhist temple down a nearby side street, dozens of stranded flood victims waited for a doctor to arrive by boat. One elderly woman says fast-rising waters forced her to flee without her diabetes medication. Another needed an injection for anemia.

Outside, two other flood threats were visible €” a 6-foot (2-meter) python held in a garbage can after it was caught near the shelter, and a fat 6-inch (15-centimeter) leech scorched on the temple's marble stairs by a cigarette lighter.

Thailand has a robust health infrastructure that extends from top-notch Bangkok hospitals that draw foreign medical tourists to an army of 900,000 community health workers who serve their neighbors in even the most remote villages. Childhood vaccination rates are high, which helps prevent fast-spreading diseases such as measles.

But even with all of that built-in support, Dr. Wiwat Wiriyakijja of Thailand's Health Ministry says he worries the worst may be yet to come.

While unloading boxes of medical supplies at the temple, he says cases of leptospirosis have already been reported. The waterborne bacterial infection, carried in rat and other animal urine, can seep into cuts through floodwaters and potentially kill if left untreated.

"I fear it as well," Wiwat says, adding that a doctor fell ill with the disease after treating patients in hard-hit Ayutthaya province, north of Bangkok. "It's very dangerous."

Samroeng, a 10-year veteran of the city's sanitation department, says he too worries about catching something from the fetid waters. He and his colleagues walk about 6 miles (10 kilometers), seven hours a day, through water that can reach chest-high. They encounter syringes, fluorescent light bulbs that could explode and even chunks of human feces that must be bagged in plastic and taken to dry land for proper disposal.

"I cannot fear getting sick. Who wants to have these diseases?" he asks before wading father down the flooded street. "It's my job. It's my responsibility."