Bangkok--5 Mar--AIT
Thailand has three options for managing and controlling floods, including creating a detention basin of three million Rais (3000 million cubic meters); creating an additional East flood bypass channel; and creating both East and West flood bypass channels in addition to the detention area. These options were postulated by eminent flood expert Dr. Seree Supratid of The Sirindhorn International Environmental Park, Climate Change and Disaster Center, Rangsit University at a discussion organized by the Asian Institute of Technology (AIT) on 24 February 2012.
Dr. Seree stated that there is a “do nothing option” as well, though ideally Thailand has to decide between creating a retention area, either along with or without the flood channels.
Speaking at AIT at an event organized to mark the return of AIT to its campus after being inundated on 21 October 2011, Dr. Seree stated that during the past decades, weather patterns in Thailand have fluctuated from severe droughts and floods. He quoted a World Bank study which stated that a year of flood can be followed by a drought and a heat wave in successive years.
Dr. Seree remarked that the cumulative rainfall since January 2011 led to a huge accumulated flood water volume in Nakhon Sawan province of Thailand, which culminated in the Great Thailand Flood of 2011. The Chao Phraya River has a basin area of about 162,800 square kilometres, and Nakhon Sawan is the area of confluence of four rivers, namely the Ping, Wang, Yom and Nan rivers.
Responding to queries on whether Thailand will be flooded in 2012, Dr. Seree stated that there is an uncertainty related to climate forecasts, and the acceptable range of good forecasts is less than 10 days. He suggested better forecasting of inflow of water to dams; stress on risk communication; an adequate decision support system; better land-use planning and flood risk assessment as the lessons learnt from the 2011 flood.