Residential Area Flooded
When floods of this magnitude arrive, they destroy everything, be it homes or industries, hospitals or schools, the water travels in every available space and doesn’t stop until all of it has passed through. Quick Pack Pacific staff was all affected in their residential area. Those living in high rise condominiums could not enter or exit their homes but saved their belongings, although those who lived in single homes or on 1st floors lost everything. My family and I live in Garden Home Village, this village seemed a safe place at first because it had a sluice gate for controlling water levels from the canal at the back and a small dam was created at the front for protecting water coming from the roads, the tragedy is that the side wall collapsed to the pressure of the water and within a few hours the entire area of about 300 homes was covered by water. This happened on 26th October 2011, 5 days after water had reached our factory, it arrived at our homes, but here it was much worse! At the factory the maximum level that was reached was 1.7 meters, whereas at our homes the level was double that and actually surpassed 3.0 meters. Because of the fact that the sidewall ruptured, the evacuation became a total emergency. We were one of the first to have boats because of our factory being already flooded, so I used our first motorboat to get as many people as we could out of there. We had been told that the maximum level the floods could reach was 0.5m or 1.0m in worse case scenario. My house is more than 1 meter higher than the road so we thought every thing would be safe, but my own cars got completely submerged with the copious amounts of water that arrived. We also lost all our books and furniture and television, as we never could have imagined such amounts of water would be coming in and we didn’t have much time to move our things.
Many memories were taken away with the water. Our houses became swampland with dirty liquid; the smell was horrible enough to make you sick. Even what had been saved on the second floors was quickly becoming vulnerable to the bacteria and fungus that started growing everywhere.
3 crocodiles were reportedly seen inside the area as it had become a Ghost town with no electricity or running water, no body was living there. My parent’s and my sister’s house were so badly hit that when we went back to control their place, we had to swim even on the inside of their house!! Everything that was made of wood was destroyed (except Teak wood that was damaged but survived), sometimes some furniture even disappeared in the water as it became pulp and mixed up with the rest of the junk floating about everywhere. The scenes we saw were all very desperate and sad.
Water finally subsided on 12 December 2011 after almost two months, and it left behind a massive destruction. Most trees died as a result, although the area is still called Garden Home Village today, it definitely doesn’t deserve that name anymore. I think that the worst thing about this ordeal was that the NORTH of BANGKOK was sacrificed in order to save Bangkok city center. The flow of the water was blocked with big bags of sand just a few km on the outskirts of the city. Thus, not allowing water to flow freely to the sea as it should, had it not been blocked, the water would have flowed through Bangkok and the levels would have been lower in general and this emergency would have lasted much less. Another factor that is hard to comprehend was the total lack of information fed to us, nobody knew how much water was coming and how deep it would get, nobody knew how long it would last and most importantly, relief was slow and not appropriate in many areas. This is Thailand, and people here never stopped smiling and never stopped fighting even for a second, and this is what makes this country so great even in such difficult times. With all the challenging decisions that had to be made by the government, the Thai people everywhere accepted their faith and never lost hope. This experience actually brought many individuals closer together as they struggled to survive this nightmare as best they could.