Thailand's Turn For Floods

[redhen]

Dang..i'd kill for legs like those..*sigh*
I'm sorry for everyone over there..

Does this happen every year? Or is it a fluke of nature thing?

 

[thaiturkey]

Quote:
It's a pity that I missed the face when I took the picture. Pretty at first glance but then you notice the bone structure. Then you hear the voice! This katoey hasn't yet had the full series of operations.

I wonder that the legs have enough power to walk in those shoes.

Back to floods. This is the first time such floods have been know in living memory, or fifty years, depending on your age. South East Asia in general has had an unusually wet rainy season after not much of one last year and a late start this year. There is always some minor flooding in low lying places because that's the nature of the land here. It's flat rice land below the mountains and crossed by a network of rivers, streams and canals. What's different this year is the sheer volume of rain in just a few weeks at the very end of the rainy season when the reservoirs were already getting full. The ground was saturated from rain and now the government has been forced to release water from the reservoirs to protect the dams. I heard yesterday that six dams in our Province are in this state.

It's a pity that the government couldn't help people to prepare more. Every day they suggest what might be the extra depth of water after the next release from the dams so they should also have been able to set up transport, food and other aid in advance for the people who were to be affected. So, it's partly a natural phenomenon but mainly the result of man's interference with nature. The world wants Thai rice and corporate greed takes over. As ever, it's the poor who suffer while the Bangkok merchants sit on their behinds waiting for the second rice crop this year. They are selling at record prices but the farmers are paid no more then previously when they sell to the processing plants. The farmer's meanwhile have lost their home contents and their houses are chest deep in water or worse. They can only hope that their rices crop survives this otherwise they have also lost half of their income for one year.

 

[thaiturkey]

I need some chemistry advice, please.

We have used our well water only on the garden until now and never checked it's mineral or other content. A sample of the water was left to settle for about 24 hours. No sediment appeared. This morning, I boiled it and left it to cool. Soon a white sediment appeared. The taste is very slightly salty. This is apparently standard with local well water but I can't get the English word for what the stuff is.

I want to top up the tank with well water and the bleach as suggested by Boyd but need to know more about the mineral deposit that appeared after boiling. We can avoid drinking it but I'm also concerned about the plastic and metal in the house water system.

Any clues, please?



Edit: I'm now told that this is limestone. That's certainly one of the common bedrocks here but I wonder why it appeared only after I boiled the water. Now, I think that limestone makes water hard and, in time, clogs up the pipes. We're talking about a few days or a week or two here so that should not be a problem.

Advice still welcome though, please.

 

[Dunkopf]

Too bad Thai. Sounds like you're doing okay. Hope your friends, family and acquaintances are ok. Kind of sounds like Katrina or something as far as your government goes.

Talking about water. How long does water stay good in a plastic 55 gallon drum with a decent lid. Not airtight but close. I keep 5 of them in my basement in case of a power shortage or if we have to take refuge from a tornado and get buried downstairs or something fun like that. We live on top of a hill and are higher than most of the surrounding country. So unless something mythical happens we aren't too worried about floods.

 

[thaiturkey]

Quote:
Thanks Dunkopf. We are in good shape. Just lacking the convenience of hot flowing water. We have food for a few days and there's no shortage of fish.

A long drive away from town will take us to a supermarket and local markets if the needs arises.

Water in a plastic drum should sat usable, other than for drinking, indefinitely, I would have thought. many people here store water in huge concrete pots outdoors. I don't do that because you just cannot keep the bugs from getting in an breeding. When thing return to normal I might install another steel tank next to the present one. That would give us about a week's supply in an emergency; longer if we use the well too. An advantage of that arrangement would be that the stored water would be constantly refreshed.

It is much like your experience with Katrina, I think. The help given is token only. The Prime Minister visited the city in a thirty car convoy yesterday. That means the highway from Bangkok, about two hundred miles way, would be lined with policemen holding back other traffic. I haven't seen a single cop helping flood victims. The PM was there to visit a government hospital but my information was that it had been evacuated and was surrounded by flood water. My friend's house just along the road from there is flooded. Yesterday afternoon and evening we saw the first helicopter circling. It was probably assessing the area of flood. Food drops and a rope to some trapped villages might have been a good idea.

 

[Dunkopf]

You don't have a guy there named "Good Job Brownie", do you?

Yes they really messed up on Katrina. New Orleans is still at half speed. I bet your countrymen are probably better at bouncing back. Am I correct in thinking that Thailand probably has a higher percentage of rural vs urban than the USA does? I'm just asking because most of what we see about Asian countries is based on what Hollywood shows us. It's not really taught in schools and most people don't do a lot of reading about it. My foreign country experience is limited to what I saw while in the Army. Just European countries.

I wish we had the money to spend about 5 years just traveling the world.

 

[thaiturkey]

Quote:
I don't know the name.

Your government was at least embarrassed when people criticised it's poor response to Katrina. Ours doesn't give a flying fig what the country folk suffer or think. People mutter amongst themselves but don't complain in public. However, they are used to surviving and always help one another. Families first, of course but I've seen strangers go to help an old lady who lived alone until her family could get to her house. Everyone I meet is smiling and even laughing despite their problems at the moment. I imagine that it was much the same in British cities during the WWII blitz. They will bounce back quickly but the material damage will take longer. Imagine a whole city and our market town and all of the facilities that we take for granted wiped out overnight. The building remain of course but lost are hospital equipment, restaurant kitchens, shop chiller and freezers, furniture shops, hardware store, builders merchants. The list is huge.

Thailand, in fact all of South East Asia, is different from what you are led to believe in the movies. Another source of misleading information is the travel websites. I guess it's difficult to get an impression of a country and what it's like to live there is difficult until you do it. Nowhere is perfect and Thailand has its problems. Westerners can find some of the attitudes frustrating but we learn to adapt to some extent and keep some of our old culture at home. An example, so obvious at the moment, is the disinclination to plan ahead.

Perhaps, if some people would be interested in knowing about life in Thailand, I'll start a thread. I don't want to write long boring essays but I could kick start it and then try to answer questions. What do you folks think?

I don't know how the population is divided between rural and urban but I'll try to find out. I think that Westerners sometimes imagine the cities are full of tumbledown wooden buildings, rickshaws and people wearing straw hats struggling through resistant rain showers with spies running around in Western suits.

 

[thaiturkey]

Here's an update and some more pics. The relief effort has improved enormously:

http://www.grumpyexpat.com/blog/2010/10/pak-thong-chai-flood---update.html

We are still fine at home. There's much less rain at the moment and its hot and sunny today (normal!). We still have electricity.

I put bleach in the water tank and topped it up with well water. So far no-one has been ill but we are using bottled water for drinking to be on the safe side. Thanks for the tip, Boyd. And thanks to everyone else for your suggestions.

 

[turney31]

thaiturkey, I would love for you to start that thread!