รวบรวมข่าวน้ำท่วม จากสื่อต่างประเทศนะครับ

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พอดี มีเพื่อนส่งข้อมูลมา เลยเอามาแชร์ครับ


สรุปเหตุผลจาก Bloombergแบบสั้นๆน่ะครับ จัดไปครับอันแรก (จากเพื่อน)

1. เรดาร์ตรวจสภาพอากาศตกยุค (หน่วยงานภาครัฐที่รับผิดชอบขอสั่งซื้อไปตั้งแต่ปี 2009 แต่ก็ไม่ได้รับความสนใจ)

2. การบริหารจัดการน้ำที่ผิดพลาด (ตั้งแต่เดือนกรกฎา...ดราม่านี้มีหักมุมตอนจบ)

3. ฝนตกหนักเป็นปริมาณมากถึงกว่า 25%ในรอบ 30ปี ตั้งแต่เดือนกรกฎา แต่เขื่อนก็ไม่ยอมปล่อยน้ำออกมาอย่างเหมาะสม

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-10-1 ... erity.html

Obsolete’ Thai Weather Radar Blamed for Failure to Predict Rain Severity
Q
By Daniel Ten Kate and Supunnabul Suwannakij - Oct 17, 2011 9:16 AM GMT+0700

Thailand’s weather service blamed obsolete equipment for failing to predict the severity of rains that killed 307 people, saying authorities ignored upgrade requests that could have mitigated the impact of flooding.

Requests from Thailand’s Meteorological Department for a 4 billion baht ($130 million) overhaul of its radar and modeling systems have gone unheeded since 2009, deputy director-general Somchai Baimoung said. The new equipment would allow the department to more accurately forecast seasonal rains, he said, giving dam operators information needed to adjust water levels.

“If we can get this new system, it can help people,” Somchai said in a phone interview yesterday. “No one expected rainfall would be this much. Right now our system, including hardware and software, is obsolete.”

The difficulty in managing monsoon rains may shave 1.5 percentage points off growth in Southeast Asia’s second-biggest economy as floods force companies including Toyota Motor Corp. (7203) and Sony Corp. to close factories. The deluge has also damaged 13 percent of the rice fields in the world’s biggest exporter of the grain, according to the farm ministry.

Bhumibol dam, Thailand’s largest, retained most of its water prior to August to ensure sufficient supply for irrigating crops in the dry season, according to Boonin Chuenchavalit, who oversees its operation for state-run Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand. The amount of precipitation since then caught officials off guard, he said.

“We were aware rainfall would increase this year, but didn’t anticipate it would be a massive amount,” Boonin said by phone. “We have released some water by considering weather and flooding conditions since late July. Releasing so much water would worsen the flood situation.”
October Discharge

In June and July, authorities released an average of 4.5 million cubic meters of water per day from Bhumibol Dam as the water level increased to 63 percent of capacity, double the amount stored in the same period a year earlier, according to data from the Royal Irrigation Department.

The discharge increased to 22 million cubic meters per day on average in August and 26 million in September. From Oct. 1 to Oct. 14, as floods left hundreds of thousands scrambling for temporary shelter, an average of 77 million cubic meters has been released downstream each day, more than 17 times as much as in June and July, the data show.

In Sirikit Dam, the country’s second-largest that feeds the flooded area, discharge rates averaged 54 million cubic meters per day from Aug. 1 to Oct. 14, five times more than in June and July, according to Irrigation Department data. On Aug. 1, the reservoir was 79 percent full, holding twice as much water as the same date a year earlier.
Dry Season Storage

“If water was released from the dams in a proper way, the flooding would be less severe,” said Suphat Vongvisessomjai, a water expert who has designed flood defenses across Thailand. “They just kept on collecting water so they have as much as possible to use in the dry season. This is the main problem.”

Suthep Noipairoj, head of the Irrigation Department’s Office of Hydrology and Water Management, said discharges from the dams were reduced starting in April because some agriculture lands downstream were already flooded.

“The dams are full because the rainfall in the northern part of the country reached a new record high this year,” he said by phone. “It’s not true that we reduced the water released because we were concerned about water shortages. The people who said this just want to find a scapegoat.”
Heavy Storms

Rainfall in July and August was about 25 percent more than the 30-year average, according to the latest available data from the Meteorological Department. Reservoirs at larger dams across the country are 93 percent full on average, compared with 68 percent a year ago, the Irrigation Department said on its website on Oct. 14.

Five tropical storms deluged Thailand in the past few months, including Nock-Ten, which also struck the Philippines, Vietnam, Laos and China, killing more than 100 people. The water from the northern dams takes nine days to reach Bangkok, Egat Assistant Governor Kitti Tancharoen said Oct. 14.

“If they knew for sure the rain is coming, maybe they would’ve released a little bit more water,” said Chaiwat Prechawit, a former deputy director of the Irrigation Department. “The Meteorological Department can say there will be more rain than last year, but they couldn’t predict the storms would hit Thailand directly with such heavy rain.”
River Basin

The floods are centered in the Chao Phraya River Basin, an area the size of Florida where water flows from Chiang Mai in the north down to Bangkok and into the Gulf of Thailand. Average elevation in the area is less than two meters (6.6 feet) above sea level, according to the World Bank.

Since the 1950s, more than 300 dams have been built to hold water from Thailand’s monsoon rains from July to October for use the rest of the year. Bhumibol and Sirikit, funded by the World Bank after World War II to provide Bangkok with electricity and turn Thailand into a commercial rice exporter, can irrigate 400,000 million hectares (1,544 square miles) in the dry season, an area six times bigger than Singapore.

In Ayutthaya, the former capital of Thailand 76 kilometers (47 miles) north of Bangkok that is now a United Nations World Heritage Site, the annual floods helped the city repel Burmese invasions. In the 1980s, industrial parks opened in the province, attracting Japanese manufacturers such as Nikon Corp. and Pioneer Corp., which are now among the 930 factories damaged in the disaster, according to the Industry Ministry.

Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra assured Bangkok residents yesterday that the capital would be spared from flooding even as a high tide elevates water levels. The Cabinet will review the budget to help recover from the floods and manage them in the future, she said Oct. 11.

“Preventative measures are always the most effective,” said Suvit Yodmani, a former Cabinet member and ex-director of the Asian Disaster Preparedness Center. “As a whole, we could’ve done more.”

To contact the reporters on this story: Daniel Ten Kate in Bangkok at [email protected]; Supunnabul Suwannakij in Bangkok at [email protected]

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Peter Hirschberg at [email protected]

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ลองมาดูข่าวจาก New Mandala จากมหาวิทยาลัยแห่งชาติออสเตรเลีย
ซึ่งรายงานตรงกันกับBloomberg มีตัวเลขและกราฟประกอบ พร้อมSourceที่น่าเชื่อถือเช่นเดียวกับBloomberg

http://asiapacific.anu.edu.au/newmandal ... aled-rain/

Thai flood cause revealed: rain!
October 19th, 2011 by Andrew Walker · 24 Comments

There has been a lot of discussion about the causes of Thailand’s floods: environmental degradation; forest clearing; filled-in water ways; the inauspiciousness of a female Prime Minister; a hydrological plot to destabilise Yingluck; dam management; the revenge of Mother Nature for the excesses of modernity; etc. etc.

Some of these deserve further discussion, in particular the vexed issue of managing water releases from dams (a particularly complex issue given that dams serve multiple purposes) but we don’t want to lose sight of the fact that the primary cause of flooding is very high rainfall. The following graphs, which compare the 2011 monthly totals (January to September) with the 30-year averages for those months are revealing. In Chiang Mai the nine-month total was 140 percent of the average; in Lamphun 196%; in Lampang 177%; in Uttaradit 153% and in Phitasulok 146%. These are only a few locations (and all of them from lowland sites – rainfall is heavier at higher elevations) but they give a clear indication that 2011 has been an exceptionally wet year and that this has been widely spread across the Chao Phaya catchment.

(2011 data sent by email from Thai Meteorological Department; 30-year average data available here.)

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มาดูThe Economist กันบ้าง

http://www.economist.com/node/21532337

Thailand’s new government
Swept away
After the euphoria, a deluge of problems

Oct 15th 2011 | BANGKOK | from the print edition

SKED what was the biggest test for politicians, the post-war British prime minister Harold Macmillan is said to have replied “Events, dear boy, events”. Yingluck Shinawatra, Thailand’s new prime minister, might concur. Elected by a landslide just over three months ago, the euphoria of victory is being swept away by an unforeseen calamity—the worst flooding in the country for 50 years. Economic forecasts are being revised downwards almost as fast as the sandbags stack up in the streets. The signature economic policies that helped get her elected, already under fierce attack, may never be fully implemented. It has been a harsh introduction to the realities of power for the 44-year-old neophyte, who is the younger sister of the populist former prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra.

Thailand is used to monsoon rains at this time of year, but not of the intensity of the past few weeks. Over 270 people have been killed, about 700,000 homes destroyed or damaged and large areas of the central plains region have been inundated. The waters are heading for Bangkok, and an emergency call has gone out for people to donate sandbags to protect the ill-defended capital. Nonetheless, it is expected that the northern and eastern suburbs, at least, will be affected.

Ms Yingluck has been valiantly touring the flooded areas, offering moral and economic support. Nonetheless, her government’s response has been criticised as tardy and ineffective. On top of the short-term damage to the government’s reputation, however, the longer-term economic consequences of the floods will most worry Ms Yingluck and her ministers. The University of the Thai Chamber of Commerce (UTCC) has estimated that the cost of the flood damage could be as high as 150 billion baht ($4.8 billion), and that total will rise significantly if Bangkok is badly affected. The rice-growing areas of the rural north have been hardest hit; more than 3.4m acres (1.4m hectares) of farmland are already under water. So are industrial estates. Many economists are predicting that the disaster could shave 1% or so off the country’s GDP growth rate this year: UTCC, for example, is revising its forecast down from 4.4% to 3.6%.

A dip on that scale could begin to dent the government’s ambitious policies. These depend on the economy staying in the rude good health that it enjoyed under the previous government. Proposals such as a new form of rice subsidy, a doubling of the salaries of new civil servants and free tablet computers to all children starting school will cost a lot of money. Even at the best of times, all these schemes would probably have led to higher inflation and a growth in public debt. But these could now be the worst of times, particularly if the world economy slows a lot more. Exports make up more than 60% of the country’s GDP—Thailand is the world’s largest exporter of rice.

In this context, the proposed increase of the minimum wage to about $10 a day, another election pledge, is under particular scrutiny. Kittiratt Na-Ranong, a deputy prime minister and the government’s co-ordinator for economic policy, argues that this proposal reflects sensible economics rather than vote-grabbing economic populism: “Our problem is that our domestic consumption is too low”. He wants to increase the purchasing power of millions of poorer Thais so as to make the economy less reliant on the vagaries of the export markets.

Most agree that Thailand’s economy is unbalanced. However, there is plenty of argument over whether a rise in the minimum wage is the best remedy. Employers’ representatives say some small businesses could collapse if they have to accept a 50% rise (or more) in their wages bill.

It seems the government has been forced to listen, and the policy is in flux. Mr Kittiratt says the government will now start by implementing the scheme just in Bangkok and five other provinces (out of 77). However, it is unclear what will happen after that, or whether the wage will apply to the 2m or so foreign workers, many of them from neighbouring Myanmar, whose low pay depresses salaries in the first place.

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จากWall street journal สั้นๆแต่ได้ใจความ "why irrigation officials didn't begin releasing meaningful amounts of excess water from the country's reservoirs until the impact of this year's unusually ferocious rain-storms was already well under way. In previous years, the country's water managers often began releasing water from dams and reservoirs as early as July."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142 ... 90718.html

Floods Set Back New Thai Leader

By JAMES HOOKWAY

BANGKOK—Recriminations over the handling of Thailand's worst floods in half a century are causing fresh setbacks for Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra as the financial cost of the disaster continues to mount and her government firmed up plans to inject billions of dollars to shore up the country's faltering economy.

Ms. Yingluck's biggest problem, analysts say, is the haphazard way information about the flood has been released, summed up by the science minister's hasty call last week for evacuating part of the capital.

The erratic information flow has unnerved residents and spooked foreign companies, which shut down operations at factories across Thailand to buy time to get a grip on the crisis. The central bank now estimates that the floods, which have taken at least 315 lives and cost over a quarter of a million jobs, will wipe as much as 1.7 percentage points off the country's growth rate this year, as the inundation continues to disrupt supply chains across Asia and beyond.

Ms. Yingluck's government Tuesday approved a plan to widen the country's budget deficit for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1 to 400 billion baht, or $12.9 billion, compared with an initial target of 350 billion baht in order revive Thailand's flagging economy and provide aid to the hundreds of thousands of people affected by the floods.

Bangkok Gov. Sukhumbhand Paribatra, who earlier said the city had escaped the worst of the deluge, held an emergency press conference Monday night to say it will be hit by a fresh inundation of water in the next two days. "Be alert, but please don't panic," he said, before pleading for donations of sandbags. Tuesday, soldiers and civilian volunteers rushed to reinforced flood defenses with sandbags around Bangkok's northern perimeter in a last-ditch effort to divert run-off from the floods.

In theory, Thailand's antiflood effort is led out of a single "war room" at Bangkok's old international airport, where deep political divisions between the populist government and conservative bureaucrats and army leaders—which in the past five years have led to a coup and massive political demonstrations, including one in Bangkok in which 90 people were killed—are carefully papered over.

In reality, analysts say, the 44-year-old Ms. Yingluck is struggling to keep a grip on the situation in the first big test of the two-month-old administration. They say that's largely because of a widespread perception that the government is controlled by former Premier Thaksin Shinawatra, her older brother, who lives in Dubai after being toppled in the coup five years ago.

"Ms. Yingluck, to her credit, has done her job well. She has been seen everywhere," said Pavin Chachavalpongpun of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore. "But the government also knew about the imminent floods two months ago and did little to prevent it. This is a leadership crisis."

Science Minister Plodprasop Suraswadi broke ranks on Thursday, rushing out of a top-level crisis meeting to tell people in northern Bangkok that they should leave their homes immediately to escape the flood. It was just the sort of stunt many Thais expect from Mr. Plodprasop, an excitable entrepreneur best known for putting exotic meats such as zebra and crocodile on the menu at a night safari in the northern city of Chiang Mai.

Bangkok's flood defenses were, in fact, intact. Mr. Plodprasop later apologized for his confusion—but not before many people abandoned their homes in a late-night rush and triggered a panic that rippled across much of the city.

"I'm sorry to say we fell for it. We took the dog and high-tailed it out of there," said one resident of a low-lying area, who asked not to be named out of embarrassment.

Shortly after, Mr. Sukhumbhand, the city governor, told anxious Bangkok residents to listen to him, and him alone.

Since then, the debate over how to handle Thailand's flood crisis has grown more and more tetchy. Former Premier Abhisit Vejjajiva, who faced a smaller flood crisis last year, is urging Ms. Yingluck to declare a state of emergency and postpone a series of populist cash handouts that were a key pledge of her successful election campaign earlier this year. A state of emergency, among other things, would increase the flood-relief authority of Thailand's military and allow it to intervene in disputes between villagers over where to divert the run-off from the flood.

Ms. Yingluck so far has refused, arguing the declaration might scare off foreign visitors just as Thailand prepares for its peak tourist season.

Other observers, for their part, question why irrigation officials didn't begin releasing meaningful amounts of excess water from the country's reservoirs until the impact of this year's unusually ferocious rain-storms was already well under way. In previous years, the country's water managers often began releasing water from dams and reservoirs as early as July.

n the meantime, the government continues to send mixed signals. As floodwater knocks out more industrial parks—a sixth was shut down Monday—businesses are wondering just how far the crisis will go.

One of Honda Motor Co.'s Thai plants is swamped and Toyota Motor Co. said Friday that it was extending a shutdown of its Thai operations until the end of this week at least, because suppliers of key components are still affected by the floods. Makers of semiconductors and hard drives have also been badly affected, with many businesses complaining that the government hasn't developed a long-term solution for Thailand's periodic flooding.

A Japanese trade group already has said that Japanese companies—including many of Thailand's biggest foreign investors—didn't know what was happening and what was accurate.

"They received warnings but not enough information and not enough to time to decide what steps to take," said Seiya Sukegawa, an economist at the Bangkok office of the Japan External Trade Organization.

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Thai Floods Jolt PC Supply Chain

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142 ... 73290.html

BY SHARA TIBKEN

Western Digital Corp. said flooding in Thailand is having a "significant impact" on the hard-disk drive maker's operations and its ability to meet customer demand in the current quarter, adding supply concerns to an industry already hurt by weak consumer spending on PCs.

The flooding in Thailand, the world's second-largest exporter of hard-disk drives, comes during the key selling season for hard-disk drives, with PC makers obtaining supplies for holiday sales. Analysts said it likely will lead to higher prices and potential supply constraints later this year or early next year.

"The PC market has been demand challenged, but now ...

Read more: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142 ... z1bORf5ePo