Rescuing a Sinking City

Lashed by monsoon rains, sodden Bangkok slowly goes under

Two people are shot when a group of desperate families raids a flood-control embankment. The wounded raiders are seeking to drain the water from their suburban Bangkok district; the gunman is protecting his dryer neighborhood. Elsewhere in the sodden Thai city, slumdwellers stage boat races in water fouled with raw sewage, and medical teams distribute antityphoid vaccine and foot-fungus ointment. It is monsoon season in Southeast Asia, and as this year's rains have made all too obvious, Bangkok (pop. 5.5 million) is slowly sinking.

The Thais themselves inadvertently pulled the plug. Their 200-year-old capital began as a trading village in swampy lowlands on the banks of the Chao Phraya River. Natural and man-made klongs (canals) provided transport and natural drainage. After World War II, economic growth lured hundreds of thousands of workers to the city, and newly prosperous Bangkok took to the automobile with a vengeance. In the scramble for road space, most klongs were filled in.

When the city's water supply failed to keep pace with expansion, private industries, hotels and housing estates sank their own artesian wells into the water table on which the city rests. During the past 15 years, with more than 11,000 wells sucking the underground reservoir dry, the city has been sinking at a rate of four to twelve inches a year. Parts of the city have dropped as much as three feet. Warns Prinya Nutalaya, professor of geotechnical engineering at the Asian Institute of Technology: "If nothing is done, all of Bangkok will be under water by the turn of the century."

The warning signs are everywhere. One shopping mall needed new steps to cover a yawning cavity where foundation and structure had parted. On many city streets, rows of boxlike shops have plunged several feet below crumbling sidewalks. Deep cracks creep along concrete walls of office buildings and townhouses. Floods strike if it rains more than one inch an hour. In early September a three-hour cloudburst covered most of the city with a foot of water.

A combination of public apathy and the government's traditional mat pen rai (never mind) attitude has for years hampered efforts to save the city. But now Deputy Prime Minister Phichai Rattakul is leading a movement to design an antiflood master plan. Thirty-two projects have been approved so far. It is estimated that the entire plan will be completed in five to ten years.

Since the Chao Phraya's waters are committed to the irrigation of farm land, Bangkok will have to pipe in its water supply from a river some 60 miles to the west.

The private wells would be shut down, and a dike could then be built around the city, with a runoff canal leading directly to the sea. Finally, the plan calls for Bangkok's sagging water table to be refilled, a move that should stop the sinking process. City planners are pessimistic, however, because the final price tag could run to several times Bangkok's annual budget of $207 million.

Still, Deputy Prime Minister Phichai is determined to solve the problem. Says he: "Even if it would cost 10 billion baht [$435 million], I don't mind." Others fear that the project will fall victim to post-monsoon mat pen rai. Predicts one specialist on flood control: "After autumn, after the rains, they will forget." . This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.