Thailand’s surreal industrial park: crocodiles but no chips
By Ploy Ten Kate, with additional reporting by Pisit Changplayngam, Jutarat Skulpichetrat in BANGKOK, and Iktae Park in SEOUL; Editing by Alan Raybould and Miyoung Kim AYUTTHAYA, Thailand, November 24 (Reuters) – Knee-deep in foul-smelling water, workers are piling office equipment, documents and food onto fibre boats that ferry them from one building on Hana Microelectronics’ 12-acre company site to another with more space on higher floors. It has been six weeks since Thailand’s worst flooding in decades turned its industrial heartland into a real-life Waterworld and the water is going down 20 cm a day. But it reached 2 metres at one point and will take time to clear, said General Manager Bruce Stromstad. Hana Microelectronics Pcl, Thailand’s biggest semiconductor packager, managed to get its integrated circuits — a vital part in virtually all electronic equipment from mobile phones and tablets to computers — outside the flood zone a week before the water breached defensive dikes on Oct. 13. But it could do nothing about the dozens of machines weighing up to 5 tonnes each on the ground floor of the main building, which was almost entirely submerged. “As you can see, it’s still a big mess here,” said Stromstad, as he directed some of the 50 staff — skilled workers mucking in with the rest — scrubbing dirty floors and removing sandbags in the burning sun. “Right now, it’s just planning for the clean-up. We had to purchase a lot of materials, equipment for power washing the walls and disinfectant to take care of the mould, funguses, things like that.” […] Like many flood-hit manufacturers, the biggest problem in getting production back to normal is finding electricity and clean water, Stromstad said, expecting it will be months before they are back into production. “We’re talking about late Q1 – February, March,” he said. “We have no electricity for emergency generators and that’s what we need from the government and the industrial estate authority,” Stromstad, wearing knee-high rubber boots and a baseball cap, said as he surveyed the damage. “We need to be able to turn on the air conditioning, which will then allow us to dehumidify the building.” “The concern now is employees’ health because this water is pretty dirty. A lot of what we were bringing in was bathing water, as well as drinking water and food, because when they get out of the water, the first thing everybody wants to do is wash.” And it’s not just the industrial waste and oil in the murky water that the workers need to worry about: reptiles are also lurking. Two crocodiles have been spotted in the parking lot and a cobra snuck into the building, prompting a rapid fumigation of the premises. […]
