Thousands flee flooded Bangkok

first official evacuations were ordered.

Floodwaters have killed 373 people nationwide since July, caused billions of dollars in damage and shut Bangkok’s second-largest airport.
A huge runoff from the north is expected to reach the capital at the same time as seasonal high tides, the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said.
“The floodwater has reached the inner city,” it said.

Bangkok’s Governor, Sukhumbhand Paribatra, said residents of two of the city’s 50 districts – Don Muang and Bang Phlat both already partly submerged – should leave for safer city shelters.
“This is the first time I am using the term ‘evacuation’, the first time I’m really asking you to leave,” Mr Sukhumbhand said.

Thousands of people packed Bangkok’s Mo Chit bus terminal, trying to leave on their own. Many appeared to be taking advantage of a five-day public holiday.
The mass exodus included thousands of migrants from neighbouring Burma, workers depending on low-paying jobs so desperate to leave they are willing to brave a return to their repressive homeland to do so.

Authorities were also forced to move hundreds of inmates from three prisons – many on death row – to other provinces.
Satellite maps of Bangkok showed a city almost entirely surrounded by water. Most of the vast pools of runoff now submerging a third of the country are flowing from the north towards Bangkok and

southward towards the Gulf of Thailand.
“The amount of water is gigantic,” Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra said.

In the district of Sai Mai, on the capital’s northern outskirts, hundreds clambered aboard packed military trucks with their belongings, desperate to leave. But help was scarce.
Others got out any way they could – in paddle boats, plastic tubs, inner tubes and rubber rafts. Several men floated down a flooded road in a makeshift boat made of empty oil barrels tied to a plank. On

Tuesday, floods breached barriers protecting the capital’s Don Muang airport, used mainly for domestic flights. The country’s main international airport is still open. – AP/AFP.