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Shrinking Pattaya Reservoirs


forcebwithu

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Today's update on the shrinking Mabprachan Reservoir. As before, here's the Google Earth view of today's route and picture taking spots.
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Pic 01: Not much movement, if any of the shoreline from the last update 12 days ago.
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Pic 02: However definitely more land that was previously underwater is now exposed.
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Pic 04
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They now have a pump ready to pupmp water over a land bridge so the pumping station farther north has access to what's left of the main body of trapped water.
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Guessing the water level is down another 1/2 meter from 12 days ago.
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Pic 05: Won't be long before that spit of land in the distance becomes a land bridge all the way across the north end of the reservoir. On the left side of the pic you can see how the main body of water is now cutoff from the channel that leads to the pump station by another land bridge heading to the north. I don't know why they don't get an excavator in and cut a channel through rather than pumping the water over.
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Pic 06: Since the channel into the pumping station is now on higher ground than the main body of water to the south, they had to build a retaining wall and now have to pump the water into the pond.
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The gate was unlocked so had a peak at the pumps in the pumping station.
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Pic 07
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Pic 08
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Pic 09: A few puddles of water left on the north end, but no way to get it to the pumping station.
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Pic 10
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Pic 11
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Pic 12
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Pic 13
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Pic 14: If I had wanted to, I could have rode my mtn bike from this side of the reservoir over to the other side using the land bridge in the center of this pic.
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Pic 15: Instead I rode out the spit of land a bit farther south. View to the north while standing on land that was underwater 12 days ago.
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For comparison, pic 19 in the screenshot below was how far I could ride my bike out on 28 January.
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Pic 16: The intake water line for the retention pond on the southwest corner of the reservoir is really having to extend out to get to the main body of water now.
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Pic 17: I was told by someone that lives in the area this retention pond and pump house is used to supply water to the new Flowerland tourist trap. Probably in another month or so all the tourists will see for their entrance fee is a bunch of wilted flowers.
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Had a nice ride out to Huai Chak Nok Reservoir today. The water situation is looking pretty dire there too.

Google Earth view of the photo stops today. I've also noted the change in the water's edge since the last update on 28 December.
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Pic 1
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Pic 2
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For comparison, pic from 28 December
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Pic 3: Workers taking advantage of the low water levels to dig a channel into the shallow part of the reservoir. Should help in future draughts as they won't have to set up pumps to get the water from the shallow areas into the main body of water.
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Pic 4
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Pic 5
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Pic 6: Interesting erosion lines and rock structures in the exposed lakebed.
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Pic 7
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Final pic is looking at the south end of the reservoir on the other side of the road.
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I was in LK Metro on Thursday night, 2 tankers went in there and 1 this morning too.

Tony's Gym on Khoa Talo has a sign up today "No Water" and also a couple of the small tankers delivering water to places on Khoa Talo today.

How many days rain would it take to get that water level back up to a decent level ?

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6 minutes ago, mrcharliemofo said:

I was in LK Metro on Thursday night, 2 tankers went in there and 1 this morning too.

Tony's Gym on Khoa Talo has a sign up today "No Water" and also a couple of the small tankers delivering water to places on Khoa Talo today.

How many days rain would it take to get that water level back up to a decent level ?

I'm seeing a lot more water delivery trucks about lately. I know there's been periodic water outages around Pattaya, but I don't know if it's to conserve water or because of the infrastructure improvements going on. @tommy dee, do you have contacts within the city govt that you can use to find out what type of measures are taking place to conserve water? And if they are water outages, when, where and for how long are they occurring?

As for the amount of rain needed to get us back up to a decent level, that won't happen until the next rainy season. What we need is the remnants of a typhoon to move into our area. That happened back in September 2015 when the remnants of tropical storm Vamco hit Pattaya.

This picture is from September 7, 2015. It should look familiar as that's what the "island" looks like now.
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On September 14, Vamco made landfall in Vietnam. A couple of days later we were inundated in Pattaya. On September 21 we had our island back.
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Like posters above, the small water tankers have been very evident along buckhou and its side sois over the past few days, much more so than last week. There were 2 delivering water to a walking street gogo on Wednesday about 11pm

The massage place the gf works in ran out of water yesterday. It took the tanker so long to arrive as it was busy that she and her colleagues walked to her room to use the toilet there.

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We're probably seeing the beginning of the impact the drought is going to have on Pattaya, and also other cities around Thailand. My guess is in the coming weeks we'll see more and more news reports on how the lack of water is affecting businesses. Worse case scenario, hotels lack the water for their guests to take showers, or Buddha forbid the soapies have to shut down for lack of soapy water. Not a good time to be running a tourist oriented business in Thailand.

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7 minutes ago, forcebwithu said:

We're probably seeing the beginning of the impact the drought is going to have on Pattaya, and also other cities around Thailand. My guess is in the coming weeks we'll see more and more news reports on how the lack of water is affecting businesses. Worse case scenario, hotels lack the water for their guests to take showers, or Buddha forbid the soapies have to shut down for lack of soapy water. Not a good time to be running a tourist oriented business in Thailand.

Good thing tourism is way down. No-one around to tell their friends how bad things are.

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1 hour ago, forcebwithu said:

@tommy dee, do you have contacts within the city govt that you can use to find out what type of measures are taking place to conserve water? And if they are water outages, when, where and for how long are they occurring?

It is very disappointing that nothing appears to be being done to conserve water. At the very least, I would have hoped my condo management would have put up signs asking residents to limit their use of water as much as possible. Also, I would have expected for there to be a ban on water features, such as the one at Central Festival.

Where does the trucked-in water originate from? How long will that supply last for?

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40 minutes ago, Bazle said:

It is very disappointing that nothing appears to be being done to conserve water. At the very least, I would have hoped my condo management would have put up signs asking residents to limit their use of water as much as possible. Also, I would have expected for there to be a ban on water features, such as the one at Central Festival.

Where does the trucked-in water originate from? How long will that supply last for?

The silence has been deafening from govt officials about measures they have or intend to put into place to conserve water. If they are limiting water via outages, it sure would be nice if they would publicize that so we can plan our water use accordingly. But seeing as how Thailand is so keen on putting their best face forward to the world, that's probably why they're being tight lipped about the draught.

I also wonder if that's why the Weekly Water Situation report hasn't been updated for over two weeks now. Based on the reports that have been published, my back of the napkin estimate was they had about seven weeks of water left as of 31 January.

 

As for the source of water for the trucked in water, it's like when you eat a hot dog, you're probably better off not knowing the source. But since you asked, I see them filling up at various scum filled, smelly brown water ponds that are scattered throughout the area. It's water I wouldn't even want to wash my feet with.

Edited by forcebwithu
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most,e xcept the rogue, truck fill up from filling stations that pump up to tanks from the water table below ground.  the old trick of taking from ponds and streams is pretty much histroy except for the old conners that i guess are still around.  i had 8 huge tanks last week for the pool refill, crystal clear

 

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6 hours ago, Sigi said:

According to the Provincial Waterworks Authority has Pattaya at least enough water to last through June.

https://www.pattayamail.com/featured/pattaya-has-enough-water-until-june-pwa-288091

🙂

That news article doesn't instill much confidence when stating "they currently have 264,000 cubic meters of water" as water capacity is measured in million cubic meters (MCM). And even if they got the units wrong, there's no way the combined total capacity of the area reservoirs is 264,000 MCM.

To put into perspective how small 264,000 cubic meters of water is. We have 15 weeks until June. That means the weekly water consumption rate to make it to June would have to be 17,600 cubic meters/week. One Google source states the average household use of water is .78 cubic meters. So 17,600 cubic meters of water/week would supply at most 22,600 households. From Wiki, a 2010 census put the population of Pattaya, which doesn't include tourists at 320,262. That is about 127,088 households using an average of 2.52 people per household.

So I call BS that we can make it to June on the available water. The only way we're going to make even to April is if the city supply also uses bore holes to tap the aquifer.

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The Eastern Water Resources dept has finally gotten around to updating their Weekly Water Situation reports for February 7th & 14th. Consumption has slowed from 6 million cubic meters (MCM)/week to about 4 MCM/week. Storage volume as of 14 Feb was 67.5 MCM. Subtracting the minimum storage volume of 31.7 MCM leaves about 36 MCM of usable water, or about a 9 week supply at current consumption levels. That will get us to 17 April, far short of June that a recent PWA news report would have us believe.

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Another official response:

Quote

Thai Government says despite drought water supply sufficient until rainy season

By
 Adam Judd



 

 

Edited by Evil Penevil
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