Thousands flee Bangkok fearing surging floods – One airport shuts down

BANGKOK (AP) – Bangkok residents jammed bus stations and highways on Wednesday to flee the flood-threatened Thai capital, while others built cement walls to protect their shops or homes from advancing waters surging from the country’s flooded north. “The amount of water is gigantic,” Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra said. “Some water must spread into Bangkok areas but we will try to make it pass through as quickly as possible.” Some neighborhoods on the city’s fringes were already experiencing waist-high flooding, but central areas remained dry. Everywhere, people were preparing for flooding that seemed all but inevitable. Websites posted instructions on the proper way to stack sandbags. Many residents fortified vulnerable areas of their houses with bricks, gypsum board and plastic sheets. Walls of sandbags or cinderblocks covered the entrances of many buildings. Concern that pumps would fail prompted a run on plastic containers in which to hoard water. Anticipating worse, one woman traveling on Bangkok’s Skytrain system carried a bag of life vests. Flood waters breached barriers protecting the capital’s second largest airport on Tuesday, halting commercial flights and underlining the gravity of the Southeast Asian nation’s deepening crisis, which has seen waters inundate a third of the country and kill 366 people over the last three months. Yingluck’s government has declared a five-day public holiday for Thursday through Monday in affected areas, including Bangkok, while the Education Ministry ordered schools to close until Nov. 7. Many anxious city residents took advantage of the holiday to leave the capital or prepare for a possible watery siege. Panic buying of food and other necessities emptied the shelves of many supermarkets. Bottled water and toilet paper were in especially short supply. […]

Thousands flee Bangkok fearing surging floods

BANGKOK (AP) – Advancing floodwaters in Thailand breached barriers protecting Bangkok’s second airport Tuesday, halting commercial flights at a complex that also houses the country’s flood relief headquarters and thousands of displaced people. The flooding at Don Muang airport, which is primarily used for domestic flights, is one of the biggest blows yet to government efforts to prevent the sprawling capital from being swamped. Its effective closure is certain to further erode public confidence in the ability of Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra’s administration to defend the increasingly anxious metropolis of 9 million people. Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi Airport, the country’s main international gateway, has yet to be affected by flooding and flights there were operating normally. Most of the city has been spared inundation so far. Don Muang has come to symbolize the gravity of the Southeast Asian nation’s deepening crisis, which has seen advancing waters drown a third of the country and kill 366 people over the last three months. The airport houses the government’s recently established emergency Flood Relief Operations Center, and one of its terminals has been converted into an overcrowded shelter filled with tents for about 4,000 people who fled waterlogged homes. Somboon Klinchanhom, a 43-year-old civil servant who took refuge there last week, was preparing to move after authorities said the terminal had become too crowded and thousands of people displaced there would be relocated. “I thought it would be safe and well-protected,” Somboon said of the airport, as she packed her belongings again. Though floodwaters have yet to spill across Don Muang’s runways, ankle-high water could be seen Tuesday rushing over sandbagged barriers around the airport’s perimeter, swamping internal roads. One vast pool was headed toward two Thai Airways jetliners parked outside a hangar, their wheels wrapped in plastic sheets. […]

Thai floods shut down Bangkok’s 2nd airport