September floods in Pattaya

[Rockheart]

In the last week there was some huge flash flooding from a long period of rain.
Beach road was essentially washed out with Soi Buakow filling up with a couple feet of water.

Here is some ladies and ladyboys on Soi Honey making the most of the water.
Also some other videos of the flooding.

https://youtu.be/DmuNoRA79hI

[rxpharm]

The tropical storm dumped a lot of water on Pattaya, and areas surrounding. While the flood waters have subsided, the forecast now is calling for more rain starting tomorrow. Hopefully it won't be as bad, but it certainly will hamper recovery efforts.

[George Pill]

Unbeleivable!

I am arriving in Pattaya just before Halloween. I remember there was another flood last year just before Halloween and the diesel pumps on Beach Road near Soi 7 was utterly useless. Nobody should be out on the streets as electrocution is a real possibility. Many thanks to everyone who made these videos possible. This may be the new normal in international weather.
+++++++++
After thinking about this all of last night I think the best thing to do is build drainage canals. Re-digging ditches and replacing inadequate pipes with bigger ones is too much expense and headache. Trouble is canals are made to empty into the bays, rivers, and beaches at their nearest points. That means brown water pollution. Lots of it. They are probably not telling you this, but there is sewage pollution in the flood waters which ruins the beach waters. Same thing happened in Patong Beach, Phuket, two years ago. The side streets became streams and fed into bigger streets which became rivers. Poor city planning and infrastructure. Sometime I wonder if Thailand engineers ever hear of the invention called the transit. Telescope on a tripod used to calculate distance and elevations. Manila had the same problems for year and started building huge drainage systems underground in 1977. The tunnels were so big in Quezon City that you could put houses into them. The drain in the road built with thick steel reinforcement rods in front of my apartment was about 20' X 20'. Large. Luckily I had a small Honda XL motorcycle and could ride on the sidewalk around the construction and get off to school. People with cars in their garages were inconvenienced. But with graft and bribery nobody took the trouble to remove the wooden support beams holding the concrete forms up. They were left in there only to rot loose and float into log jam blockages everywhere.

So I suggest this. Do a huge construction project digging up streets like a subway project and install canals. Cover it with a concrete roof and remake the street again. Feed the canal with major perpendicular drainage pipes receiving water from huge drains strong enough for buses and trucks to drive over. When the canal(s) reach the beach build a long groin. This will be a concrete wall out into the sea and empty the water a distance away from the beach so sand won't be eroded away. Want to see an example of this? Go to Waikiki Beach. At the Diamond Head end at Kapahulu Ave you will see such a concrete groin. You can walk out to the ocean for about a 70 yards to the end. Well constructed and very permanent. You could build a longer groin. Get your best engineers and engineering students from your best colleges to tackle this problem. Invite some the world's best engineers to help. If they hear the project is in Thailand, they will come in more ways than one. Might get lucky and they will do it as a generous gesture of international good will. A nice hotel room and a generous entertainment stipend will encourage them to do their best and take home tales of the wonderful entertainment experiences which can be had nowhere else. I'm sure you can do it if the money is available. Learn how to get it honestly.

So what's it going to be? More years of super floods reported in the newspapers? More shame on Thailand as a place that cannot ensure the tourists' safety? Tourists drown or electrocuted because nobody has the will to tackle this problem intelligently. Bigger floods so strong it could pick up buses and push them out into the beach waters. Putting those diesel pumps on Beach Road was just a silly patch. Big problems need big solutions.