Thailand Floods

2011 Bangkok floods. Pic: AP.

World Bank says it will probably get worse, reports Asia Sentinel

Several decades ago, Keyes Beech, an American journalist based in Bangkok, famously had the legs of his grand piano stuck into two sets of Wellington boots, so that when the water rose inevitably in his house, the rubber footwear protected his piano.

The water could well be above Beech’s boots today. He would be alarmed at the flooding that has made high water in Bangkok no longer a joking matter. Nor is it a joke in a long list of Asian cities, even including Singapore, which may have the best infrastructure in the entire Asian region. Nonetheless, water has regularly risen hip-deep on Orchard Road, the island nation’s upscale shopping district.

Just how much urban flooding has become a regular occurrence across the region has been detailed in a voluminous 638-page report by the World Bank released Monday and titled Cities and Flooding: a Guide to Integrated Urban Flood Risk Management for the 21st Century by Abhas K. Jha, Robin Bloch and Jessica Lamond. They describe the problem as a “global phenomenon which causes widespread devastation, economic damage and loss of human lives.”

Over the past 18 months, according to the report, disastrous flooding occurred along the Indus River Basin in Pakistan, in Queensland, Australia, South Africa, Sri Lanka and the Philippines, in Pakistan’s southern Sindh Province, large areas of Thailand including Bangkok, and other areas.

“The occurrence of floods is the most frequent among all natural disasters,” the authors write. . “In the past 20 years in particular, the number of reported flood events has been increasing significantly. The numbers of people affected by floods and financial, economic and insured damages have all increased too. In 2010 alone, 178 million people were affected by floods. The total losses in exceptional years such as 1998 and 2010 exceeded $40 billion.”

The problem is that as Asia was settled – along with the rest of the world, of course – the settlers selected the mouths of rivers for the locations of their principal cities because of the ease of water transport. As climate has changed and as increased urbanization has packed these areas with people, disastrous floods are becoming a way of life.