8th November, 2007

Today's weather;

It ain't pretty, there's been pretty much a nonstop rainfall since the last 36 hours.



This on top of a gully outside of our house last evening around 7.30 pm, the cover is completely out of sight. This morning things have relaxed a little bit, it's rather a drizzle compared to the non stop rain.
Last night we had a 3 hour power cut between 6 and 9 pm!

This is front of our house. Here you can witness a very familiar sight around the island; since most roads off the main road are just dirt/sand roads, there's an incredible amount of spill over on the main road, which makes it dangerous for motorbikes. This is the spill over coming out of our neighbours road.

This is a picture of the road alongside Wat Plai Laem this morning, the whole road is under water, all the way up to 7-11 at the far end and the road is blocked off for traffic.

Current temp is 24.5C at 7 am.

Yesterday had rain almost all day, except for the morning to mid day hours when there were moments of dryness with the sun even peeking out for 5 minutes at some stage.

When I had to pick up my daughter from school around 3 pm, there was absolute and utter chaos on the roads with slow traffic at flooded parts of the road and a few cars where stuck here and there, because the drivers somehow either managed to try to get off the road and got stuck in potholes or mud or just got caught in big potholes on the road. Many motorbike drivers were pushing their bikes.

In front of Big C water was about waist high and on the road from Tesco Lotus to downtown Chaweng, various parts of the road where seriously flooded. Chaweng lake is about to burst and the two road along it is closed for motorbikes. Around Bophud traffic lights the usual flooding in front of the temple entry/exit is on again and on the ring road from the traffic lights to Tesco Lotus, there's a lot of drowned land at the right side in Bophud, where deep trenches are being dug to get rid of excess water. Some houses there are completely cut off from the roads and are only accessible by small dingys.

For tomorrow and Saturday more rain is expected/predicted and I wonder how long the island can bear this before the infrastructure collapses, mainly the road system.

Yesterday's max temp reached 27.4C and a whooping 164.2mm of rain fell.

If I end up driving somewhere today, I'm sure I'll get some pictures of the damage done here and there.

Thai Visa. com's Samui Forum has some good updates. You have to subscribe though.

Camille