Pattaya can look forward to two more years of disruptive roadwork and underground pipe installation, but city officials promise that will be the end of it.
Deputy Mayor Manote Nongyai said Oct. 25 that the last of all current road digs will be done by 2024. At that point, he claimed, there will be no further need to lay large pipes anywhere, although he stopped short of asserting that Pattaya’s flooding problems would be over.
He also failed to acknowledge that few, if any, projects ever finish on time in Pattaya, which makes the two-year estimate suspect at best.
Of course, previous mayoral administrations have made the same promise, most recently with South Road, which was dug up and then, once the project was supposedly done, dug it up again to lay new drains.
The biggest flood-mitigation project currently covers the railway-parallel road and all of Sukhumvit Road. Those systems are meant to catch all the water running downhill from the east.
Manote admitted those jobs are far behind schedule, but blamed the high-speed State Railway of Thailand project, which required rerouting of the underground pipes.
He urged residents affected by flood projects to be patient.
Manote pointed to Naklua as a successful example of how massive flood-drainage projects can vastly improve the flooding situation, even though Naklua still floods.
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