All of the students are gone and as many people as possible have moved their cars, which usually line the busy street, to higher ground. There is a wall of sandbags at the front of every building.
But the ground is dry. This is not the case, however, for everywhere in the Pathum Thani province where I live. Many low-lying areas, such as industrial areas and slum areas close to waterways, are already moderately flooded. The flooding is not due to currently falling rain, but to rain that has been falling all season, and has amassed into a huge amount of water that is slowly flowing southward, breaking levees and dams along the way. The town where I live is the last dam before Bangkok, so they are doing everything they can to make sure that it does not break.
In the absence of students on Thammasat's campus, new inhabitants have been bussed in: evacuees, 3000+ people from provinces north of here whose homes are underwater. Last night, I went to a gym that they have set up as a shelter to volunteer. We formed long lines and passed bags of rice, bottles of water, and mattresses to be loaded onto trucks and taken to where the evacuees were being housed.
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| Snapshot from the middle of the water-passing line. I found that Thai people are cheerful givers-- givers of both their resources and time. Many of the students tried to keep the atmosphere light as they made games out of the work we were doing, spreading laughter in a serious time. |
I will go back to the same gym later today. Right now, the rest of my team members are helping to build a secondary sandbag dam in case the first one does break.
As for whether or not the floods will actually reach the extent that people have prepared for, I have no idea. It is certainly hard to imagine with sunlight shining down and dry land to walk on. But I think we are all praying for it not to be as bad as is expected.
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