Nava Nakorn disaster: too little done too late

Many provinces were submerged, nearly 300 people had lost their lives, four industrial estates in Ayutthaya were under water and 200,000 plus factory workers faced an uncertain future.

Then there was Nava Nakorn, one of the Kingdom's largest industrial estates just north of Bangkok in Pathum Thani, with another 227 factories faced closure and 170,000 workers were at the risk of losing their jobs.

On Friday, fearing a repetition of Ayutthaya, I joined a petition on Twitter asking volunteers to help strengthen the flood barriers at Nava Nakorn. I also called a few contacts and continued tweeting, reminding people that it was a priority to save jobs.

Sombat Boon-ngam-anong, a red-shirt leader and president of the Mirror Foundation, which is already helping FROC at Don Mueang, did his best in sending some volunteers to the area despite the lack of transportation and coordination.

Through Twitter, I eventually managed to get in touch with someone - a journalist from Spring News -who was at the estate on Saturday night. She said things were very disorganised there as she gave me two phone numbers. One number was that of a factory manager who said he was ready to welcome volunteers, and the second was that of a Nava Nakorn staff member called Surirat who insisted there was no cause for alarm and that everything "would be fine".

I begged her to reconsider because, after all, the owners of the now submerged industrial estates in Ayutthaya obviously thought the same and were proved wrong.

In addition, there were plenty of detractors on Twitter. One argued, asking why others should go out of their way to help when Nava Nakorn had funds and many workers at its disposal. I countered saying that they were disorganised and that there was no reason not to help.

On Sunday, as volunteers kept helping out at the Don Mueang Airport shelter among others, a Bangkok tweeter posted the picture of him "taking a short break" at a resort in Hua Hin. This at a time when people just outside the capital were asking why they should not pull down barriers that kept much of Bangkok dry.

When I voiced my disgust on Twitter, someone else rebutted saying he fully supported this behaviour as this exchange had become one of the many red and yellow-shirt blame games on Twitter.

Later, it dawned on me that perhaps members of labour unions from unaffected areas could take turns helping out at Nava Nakorn. So I got hold of Chalee Nam Loisoong, president of the Thai Labour Solidarity Committee, and he started doing what he could. I also rang other red-shirt leaders like MP Weng Tojirakarn, urging them to quickly dispatch red-shirt volunteers.

However, by late Monday morning, it was all too little too late. News broke that the run-off had breached the barrier and the authorities had ordered immediate evacuation.

Could we as a society have saved Nava Nakorn? I don't know.

Just as I was writing this article, Chalee called to say that many factories in Nava Nakorn were fending for themselves.

All I could do was leave a small note on Twitter yesterday thanking the few people who had re-tweeted my largely ignored plea to help Nava Nakorn.

Upon checking my e-mail I found a note from a foreign expert in Mahidol University saying that some factories in the affected industrial estates were now asking their workers to "resign" as there wouldn't be work for them "until after the cleanup".

Wonder what will happen at the other industrial estates "waiting" to be flooded down the line.