FLOOD

On Tuesday the Ministry of Education announced that all schools in Bangkok will be closed until November 6th. Logan and I are heading up north to Chiang Mai on Monday to escape the city, which is expecting more flooding tonight. We'll be back on Saturday, hopefully. Many provinces north of Bangkok have been flooded for weeks. The government chose to dam up the water to keep the city from flooding, which inevitably made the situation worse amongst other issues like deforestation and over-development.

The flood situation is projected to last for at least another month as water makes its way into the Gulf of Thailand. Many of our friends have already been affected by the floods, and as we prepared to stock our apartment with food and water, the reality of bare grocery stores (supply chains broke down as much of it is shipped in and access is currently blocked) and bottled water not being available in the city is too much of a repeat from the protests a couple of years ago. We are very fortunate to have the means to move to higher ground with a brief reprieve from the current situation. Please keep Thailand in your thoughts as it works through one of the worse floods in 50 years.

Below is a video in Thai with English subtitles summarizing how the flooding situation came to be. Imagine Spike Lee's "When the Levees Broke," but with cute info graphics.




Episode 2 explains the factors that go into variances in flood water levels:



The Atlantic is also tracking flood scenes from around Thailand.