Transport Minister Pairin Chuchottavorn and top marine-management officials hailed the rebuilding of Pattaya Beach at the official grand-opening of the rebuilt shoreline.
Reconstruction of Pattaya Beach was completed early this year, but the June 8 ceremony was the official pat-on-the-back to Pattaya and Marine Department officials who spent eight years trying to get it done.
Or course, since the rebuild finished, two major storms have ripped huge tracts of new sand back into the sea requiring Pattaya to use heavy machinery to dredge it up from under water and patch the holes.
Pattaya Deputy Mayor Ronakit Ekasingh accepted the congratulations from top Department of Marine and Coastal Resources officials.
The February 2019 completion brought to a close a tortuous eight years for Pattaya, which began the 600-million-baht-plus project in 2011 after a warning by environmental experts that Pattaya’s sandy shoreline could be wiped away within five years. Various patch jobs delayed the inevitable, but multiple missteps by both Pattaya City Hall and its expensive consultants repeatedly put the project even further behind schedule.
In March 2017, work resumed after a 15-month suspension and again was quickly halted when, again, the sand used didn’t match. The Pattaya Marine Department finally ruled that the sand was “good enough” and, after a few days in the sun, bleached to a color close enough to Pattaya’s native sand.
Completion was promised in August, then December. For Pattaya, which burned through hundreds of millions of baht, several contractors and eight years, it was better late than never. (PCPR)
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