Floods spark exodus from Bangkok

Tens of thousands of Thais are fleeing flood-threatened Bangkok after as the city’s governor ordered official evacuations for the first time since the crisis began.

Floodwaters bearing down on the city have killed 373 people nationwide since July, causing billions in damage and shutting down Bangkok’s second largest airport.

Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra’s government had repeatedly vowed to protect the capital, which has so far mostly escaped unscathed. But official assessments have turned grim in recent days, and everywhere people are preparing for flooding that seems all but inevitable.

Governor Sukhumbhand Paribatra said residents of two of the city’s 50 districts - Don Muang and Bang Phlat, both already partially submerged – should leave for safer city shelters.

“This is the first time I am using the term ’evacuation,’ the first time I’m really asking you to leave,” he said.

Elsewhere in the city, thousands of people packed Bangkok’s Mo Chit bus terminal, trying to leave town on their own. Many appeared to be taking advantage of a government-declared five-day public holiday to avoid a possible watery siege.

Some waited for hours because there was no space inside the terminal, the main departure point for buses to Thailand’s north.

The mass exodus included thousands of migrants from neighbouring Burma, workers dependent on low-paying jobs so desperate to leave they are willing to brave a return to their intensely repressive nation to do so.

Authorities were also forced to move hundreds of inmates from three prisons - many on death row – to facilities in other provinces.

Satellite maps of Bangkok showed a city almost entirely surrounded by water. Most of the vast pools of runoff now submerging a third of the country are flowing from the north toward Bangkok – southward toward the Gulf of Thailand.

In the district of Sai Mai, on the capital’s northern outskirts, waist-high water turned roads into virtual rivers and swamped service stations and homes.

Hundreds of residents climbed aboard packed military trucks with their belongings, desperate to leave. But help was in short supply.

Others got out any way they could – in paddle boats, plastic tubs, inner tubes and rubber rafts.

Several men floated down a flooded road in a makeshift boat made of empty oil barrels tied to a rectangular plank.

As fears of urban disaster set in, some residents built cement walls to protect their shops and homes.

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 travelling on Bangkok’s Skytrain system carried a bag of life jackets.