Interior minister calls meeting to handle floods

BANGKOK, September 23 (TNA) - Thai Interior Minister Jarupong Ruangsuwan and other authorities concerned have assessed the water situation and prepared measures for coping with, probably, floods in Bangkok and its peripheral provinces. Jarupong and the other concerned authorities, including governors of provinces in the Chao Phraya River basin, as well as representatives of the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration (BMA), the Royal Irrigation Department and Director of the Hydro and Agro Informatics Institute (HAII) Roryon Jitdorn, jointly made the assessment and preparation at a meeting, chaired by him, on Monday. The interior minister instructed all the provinces along the main Chao Phraya River to fully cooperate with each other and with adjacent provinces in upstream, mid-stream and downstream areas in order to integrate their prepared measures against flooding beforehand, covering water management and drainage to protect people and business firms along riversides and downstream areas from flood-related impacts. Monday's meeting coincided with reports that 21 Thai provinces across the nation have now been flooded, four of them are in the North, seven in the Northeast and the central region each, two in the East and one in the South. Meanwhile, Bangkok Governor M.R. Sukhumbhand Paribatra acknowledged that the BMA has closely monitored the updated water situation, including precipitation and water levels at main upstream dams, and found that there have been no signs of any critical water condition and flood threat in the capital late this year, like that in late 2011 when a number of low-lying areas in Thailand, including some parts of Bangkok, faced massive flooding. (TNA)