Suvarnabhumi Airport Ready To Combat Flooding

[losworld]

More brilliant planning... let's build an airport on the lowest ground we can find... maybe very near to the sea...

[jacnl2000]

"The acting director then ruled out the possibility of flood water penetrating the airport through the drain tubes, given that the drainage system is a closed network that has no links to outside pipes, while all of the entrances and exits have been raised above the levee level so water has no opportunity to enter."

A closed drainage system? Can anyone explain this one to me as I thought a drain would need at least one output or are the staff lobbing the water over the levee in buckets?

Normally the drain/output is connected to the sea, the source/input to the airport and a pipeline/gate in between.

In this case, current definitions in Wikipedia will not be of much help to you. These definitions of a closed system are rather confusing. Since in the social sciences closed systems are held to be isolated from their environment I prefer to define a closed system whether or not in operation as a system that can not be influenced by foreign factors on the outside. Basic idea is keeping an airport accessable under the most extreme surrounding circumstances. The lovely good old bucketbrigade need not to be alarmed. Today they're using pumps and pipelines. I am not sure, but a drainage system in Bangkok may also be used for storage of water for limiting the enormous amount of water extraction that such a large city needs in order to stop the city from sinking a few inches a year as it lies entirely on a swamp. I've seen a few rather confusing discussions. Not strange, when information is released and needs to arrive in human minds in understandable bits and pieces. IMMHO (in my most honest opinion) not really a political but much more an educational issue. Hope this helps.

[rogerdee123]

As the article in this thread mentions, the main reason why Bangkok and suburbs are sinking is because the ground water has been and continues to be pumped out, and I believe that this is illegal however they still do it.. The ground under bangkok is like a sponge and when the water is pumped out it compresses. This dates me but I remember when the Dusit Thani Hotel and the Bangkok Bank HQ on Silom were built. At that time in the 70's these were the highest buildings in Bangkok. Local residents thought such structures impossible. But if the pilings go to the bed rock, the buildings will stay put, even though the ground around them continues to sink. I think the 'no pumping out of groundwater' was probably enforced more rigorously in central Bangkok than out there in the suburbs, i.e. suburbs then which are now considered inner city perhaps. Lots of those housing estates have been built on very low-lying land and in some cases ground water continues to be pumped out from under them I believe.

Regarding the airport at Swampy. This was controversial since it was announced decades ago. Even then the engineers were pointing out that the area out there was necessary for flood control in Bangkok and this is besides the fact of the spongy ground underneath. However I believe that more than a few fortunes were made for the various Poo Yai's and Poo Yings over the years regarding dividing up the spoils over the land buying and selling as well as the eventual construction contracts etc. Thaksin's Govt made it worse by promoting the additional construction of that "city" or whatever it is out there.

The Buildings at Swampy should be safe enough, provided there were enough pilings and provided they went deep enough. But who knows ... as Bernard Trink used to say "tit" (This is Thailand) ... and business is business and contractors are contractors and inspectors are inspectors. There is probably corruption to some extent at every level.

The runways are a different matter. The newspaper article referred to in the thread about the runway cracks, even before the airport was opened, is an indicator of the unstable spongy ground underneath. If I am not mistaken cracks like these are an on-going and continuing problem. Depending upon the ground water in the sponge, one end of the runway can be a different height (by some centimeters or millimeters) than the other end. Or you may have a hump or depression in the middle. Competent engineers would say that this problem is destined to become worse as time passes by. But this is the long term view.

For the short term, who knows what will happen when the ground at swampy becomes saturated and stays that way for a couple of months or longer. And then dries out again.

I think we all have experiences driving along roads and highways in Thailand in the wet season where the road is dry but then we come upon a low spot in the road which has a centimeter or two of water. When those roads were constructed they were probably built properly and surveyed properly and were level originally. It's a good possibility that the low spot is an indicator of the ground subsistence, i.e. the sponge effect.

If this begins happening on the runways there will probably not only be cracks and undulations, there will be lowspots that water starts pooling in whenever it rains.