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Originally Posted by kindlekitten
Well that article certainly made it seem as though it were dire, worse than ever and so on
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Of course! You can't sell newspapers with only fluff. Ya gotta get grit.
Remember what they did with the Coup here? Everybody in the world thought tanks were rolling through my bedroom, and machine gun emplacements were on every corner. The reality was that I had to go LOOKING to even find some soldiers! Same with the floods here in the north. Every 4-5 years there is a 'real' flood, with an area 1/2 mile wide on each side of the river under a few feet of water for a few days. But otherwise, it's only low-lying intersections and patches of roads. The water shown in that photo was probably 40-60 feet in diameter, rather than an entire neighborhood. These are 'rain floods,' large 'puddles' rather than river or stream overflowing. Of course, when it rains in the tropics, it REALLY rains... But nobody dies in the rain floods. Most businesses don't even close. They just raise their stock off the floor.
But that's here in Chiang Mai... Down in Bangkok it's a different story. That's all low flatlands. Sea level. When it floods down there, the water is covering miles and miles of ground. Same for several of the other provinces. Chiang Mai is mountain country. The street in front of my house is 320m above sea level. There is a large mountain just a few kilometers to the west of me, and the main street from it slopes down past my house, past the Old City, and empties into the Ping River. When there are 'real' floods here, it's the Ping River overflowing it's banks, flooding both sides for several blocks.
Stitchawl