Thailand’s government said floodwaters around Bangkok may take as long as two months to fully recede, threatening plans by companies including Western Digital Corp. and Sony Corp. to restart production.
Floodwaters are still more than 2 meters (6.6-feet) deep around some factories in Ayutthaya province, and water levels at two industrial estates in Pathum Thani north of Bangkok are higher than protective dikes, hampering drainage efforts, Industry Minister Wannarat Charnnukul said Tuesday.
Advancing waters have swamped seven industrial estates north of Bangkok with 891 factories, and threaten two others east of the capital where Honda Motor Co. and Isuzu Motors Ltd. have operations. Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra said that eastern Bangkok should be flood-free by the end of the year, while western districts may take longer to drain.
Maruha Nichiro Holdings Inc. cannot produce some products due to shortages of cardboard and other packaging materials for transporting frozen food products from Thailand. It is considering procuring such materials in neighboring countries.
“We are still not confident about the western part of Bangkok because drainage is quite difficult,†Yingluck said. “We need to see area by area. For the east, we should be able to do it before the New Year.â€
The damage from the nation’s worst floods in about 70 years has increased to an estimated 346.2 billion baht ($11.2 billion) and may curb economic growth by between 3.1 and 3.4 percentage points this year, the University of the Thai Chamber of Commerce said on Nov. 10. The central bank said this month it may revise its forecast for 2.6 percent growth this year.
Yingluck has proposed spending 130 billion baht on reconstruction and steps to prevent future floods. She seeks to reassure investors that Thailand remains a safe place for business, as companies including Pioneer Corp. and Toyota Motor Corp. scrapped profit forecasts after the floods shut factories.
Four industrial estates near Ayutthaya, which house plants operated by Honda and Nikon Corp., may be able to resume operations next month, Wannarat said. They include Factory Land, Bang Pa-In, Hi-Tech and Rojana.
“We have made good progress and expect that about 70 percent to 80 percent of the total plants in four industrial estates should resume operations in December,†he told reporters after a weekly Cabinet meeting in Bangkok.
“The water level at these two estates is still higher than the dikes,†Wannarat said. “They need to wait until water recedes to the same level as the dikes before starting to pump water out.â€
The floods have closed 891 factories in industrial estates that employed about 460,000 people, according to the Thai Industrial Estate and Strategic Partners Association.
Authorities are diverting a slow-moving pool of water around Bangkok using a network of canals, dikes and sandbag barriers. The capital is prone to flooding because it sits at the southern tip of a river basin that empties into the Gulf of Thailand and has an average elevation of less than 2 meters above sea level.
At least 562 people have been killed since late July, when monsoon rains began lashing Thailand. Flooding worsened last month, when rainfall about 40 percent more than the annual average filled dams to capacity, prompting authorities to release more than 9 billion cubic meters of water.
The provinces of Nakhon Sawan, 218 kilometers (135 miles) north of Bangkok, and Ayutthaya, 78 kilometers from the capital, began flooding in early August. Floodwaters eventually rose as high as 3 meters in Ayutthaya and took as long as three weeks to reach Bangkok’s outskirts.
The nation’s largest dams are storing 64.9 billion cubic meters of water, or about 93 percent of their capacity, compared with 52.3 billion cubic meters at the same time last year, the Royal Irrigation Department said on its website Tuesday.
“The water level has stabilized and drainage has improved,†Yingluck said. “But, it’s still difficult to say for the western part of Bangkok because there is still a lot of water in the area and we still have problems draining it.â€
