I suppose our situation is like many others in Bangkok: We feel the official information has so far been useless.
The simple reallity of life is, that we are on our own and must take a personal resposibility for our evaluations and consequent actions. It is just not so often we are faced with this fact of life so bluntly.
In order to evaluate our risk, I inspected last week the canals of importance to the draining of our area and the water masses north of the Donmueang Airport, that will have to pass through Bangkok to get out to the sea. It looked like an evident mismatch. Officials and workers at the sluice gates out there and at the gates of our local canals confirmed my impression. It was mostly a question of the timeline that they differed on. Based on that I ordered our ground floor office dismantled and computers moved up to the fourth floor, where we could reassemble them and reestablish a working environment if we still had electricity and telephone lines and internet connection after the weekend.
We expect that our area will be flooded – but we keep waiting for it to happen. Now, that the ground floor office is packed up, we are discussing how to establish an emergency office on the upper floors and how short term, we should aim at – but if Ayutthaya is any indication, we should not expect to be able to move down again for the next month.
Questions related to our medium term survival are worrying, too. Regardless of whether or not the water may reach us and flood our office, how about our suppliers? Will they be able to supply? Will our customers cancel their orders? Will our business suffer from this disater so much that we have to reduce wages?
When will the water be here? What if it never comes…
Read also: Good Websites on the Flooding in Thailand
