On Rainstorms

During the rainy season, this is an average rainstorm.

It did that for a day and a night straight and the river rose to the brink of flooding. That was two weeks ago.

Since then, we have had at least a couple hours of such rains every single day. Evidently, the surrounding area is pretty flooded. But after the last floods cleared out the channels and gave the guys a chance to troubleshoot the pump equipment, town has stayed above water.

I'm a little bit fuzzy about it in my pedestrian state, but there are a number of pumping stations that channel water through meter-wide pipes to drainage canals that disperse in the countryside or a bigger channel out toward the bay. What's interesting, of course, is that what's pumped from the most expensive muban drains out about two income brackets down. And the top muban really is the top--the only real danger of flooding is around the perimeter of the otherwise elevated properties. Still, those are the first pumps on, and the pumps in best working order, and the drainage channels dump out just above the muban where farang teachers cohabitate, which in turn drains to the muban where farangs who have hitched and gone native live. And so on and so forth until the fields outside of town are ponds too deep for the egrets to wade and the mammalian residents don't have enough cultural clout to matter, so why not keep spouting overspill into the floodwaters?

And just for kicks, here's the site of my last accident. The oil spill is gone, but the mototaxi drivers still laugh about me splattered all over the pavement.