Beach Road was more fit for jet skis than
cars, as once again, heavy rains Oct. 19-20 were too much for Pattaya’s
feeble drainage system.
Urasin Khantaraphan & Teerarak Suthathiwong
You know the flooding is bad when kids can ride a banana boat
raft down Beach Road.
It was just one of the many water-logged sites Oct. 19-20 as heavy rain
drenched the area, creating meters-deep flooding in all the usual places
where Pattaya’s feeble storm-drainage system failed again: Beach Road,
Third Road, Soi Buakaow and on Sukhumvit Road near the highway police,
Tesco-Lotus and Boontaworn.
Rain came down heavily for two hours Sunday. And while some areas were
able to return to near-normal quickly, the lower-elevation streets were
impassable for hours.
Online social media was flooded as well, with pictures of stalled
motorbikes, minivans with water above their doorjams and of three
adventuresome kids riding a red-and-yellow banana-boat raft on Beach
Road near Soi 6.
The heavy rain, of course, came less than a week after the Thailand
Meteorological Department declared the rainy season over and the dry
winter begun.
It was travel at your own
risk as driving through Pattaya was more like forging a jungle river
when the flooded roads became nearly impassable.
Residents in the
Boontaworn area on Sukhumvit struggle to get their cars and motorbikes
out of the floods.