Distressed residents blame govt for flood-retention areas

A Nation reporter visiting severely flooded areas in Ayutthaya’s Bang Ban district last Friday heard complaints about the lack of government help and the prolonged suffering.
The flooding has cut them off from the outside world, people said. They have lost their incomes, have difficulty getting around, are immersed in stagnant, putrid water, and do not have access to proper toilets.
The Royal Irrigation Department (RID) continues to insist that their plan to store water in the 12 flood-retention fields of the Chao Phraya River Basin was properly managed, given the real-time challenges authorities faced. The department staff also say life for people living in the water retention fields will get back to normal in December.
It has been a month since the Meteorological Department announced that Thailand was in the winter season and yet many communities in the flood-retention fields are still suffering from overwhelmingly high floodwaters, leaving many people cut off from the rest of the world and unable to work.
Kulthida Thonglor, a resident of Ban Lhong Village in Bang Ban district, said her village was in the area of the Bang Ban water-retention field. Her community started to flood in August, with waters eventually reaching a height of four metres that inundated people’s elevated homes, which are built two metres off the ground.
“This year, flooding is as severe as the big flood in 2011 for us because the floodwater is very high, flooding the road to the village as well as elevated houses,” Kulthida said.
“We are suffering a great deal during this flood from the difficulties in our daily life, and because of the lack of income. And we also don’t know how much the authorities will pay for our damages after the flooding is over.”
There were 55 households in Ban Lhong Village when the floods arrived. Almost all are poor people who do not have their own farm land and have to rely on day-to-day employment. 

Many people continued to live in the flooded houses, even though there were no toilet facilities or electricity, in order to watch over their belongings. Among them are two bedridden patients trapped in the village.
Kulthida added that even though the residents were used to floods, and had lived with the issue for generations, they could not tolerate the depth of the water and the length of the flooding period this year.
Nobody chose to have a flood-retention zone imposed on his or her home, she said.
“There was a public hearing several years ago,” Kulthida recalled. “Officers from the local authority came to ask us whether we agreed to let this area be a flood-retention zone. We expressed our disagreement, but nothing happened.”
Prime Minister General Prayut Chan-o-cha has said some areas of Thailand had to sacrifice in order to save other areas from flooding and repeatedly thanked people in those areas.
However, Disaster Prevention and Mitigation Department deputy director-general Kobchai Boonyaorana has said that there will not be special compensation for the people in flood-retention fields this year.
RID deputy director-general Thongplew Kongchan expressed sympathy for the difficulties being experienced by people in the flood-retention fields. 
The government was concerned about them, he said, and had ordered the RID to reduce the inundation as soon as possible. 
The department subsequently lowered the water discharged from the Chao Phraya Dam to help drain water from the fields.
However, Thongplew said that not all water would be drained, because the department wanted to store around 339 million cubic metres in the fields to be used for farming during the dry season.
As of last Friday, 225 million cubic metres of water had been drained from 12 flood-retention fields and 1.45 billion cubic metres remained to be drained.
About 10 per cent of excess water had been drained from the Bang Ban flood-retention field, said Worawit Bunyanet, director of the Bang Ban Irrigation Project and Maintenance. He attributed the slow pace to the still-high water levels in the river, but gave assurances that the drainage operation would finish within the next month.
Worawit said the RID had carefully planned the amount of water to be stored in each flood-retention field, aiming for a consistent two metres in height to avoid flooding roads and people’s elevated homes.
However, he admitted that officers had been unable to accurately control the floodwaters at a suitable level. People outside flood-prevention dykes had allegedly opened water gates without authorisation in order to relieve flooding in their areas, he added.