A little help for flood-hit Thailand

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VOLUNTEERS at the Sri Lanka Buddhist Temple in Sentul loaded goods onto two containers for the Thai flood victims recently.

Most Venerable B Saranankara helped the volunteers load the items onto the containers.

The volunteers from Seagull Logistics, led by Sally Chan, started their journey at 6am from Port Klang by picking up goods from the Chetawan Thai Temple in Petaling Jaya and later at the Buddhist Maha Vihara in Brickfields.

Chan and company director Kumar supervised the operations.

The containers were headed to Wat Bon, the Secretariat Flood Relief Operations Centre.

Hands-on: Chetawan Thai Temple’s Phra Khru Panyatipo Woon with his team of volunteers.

Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters said Thailand was experiencing its worst floods in five decades.

Lives have been lost with property and livelihood badly affected.

Floodwaters began inundating the northern areas in August and have slowly made its way south toward the Gulf of Thailand.

More than 500 people have died in the floods, with nearly nine million affected and 27 of the country’s 77 provinces still inundated.

One third of the country is badly affected with slow signs of recovery in the North after two months of flooding.

The number of people in shelters is 117,000.

The damage cost by floods so far is about US$3.9bil.

Some 14% of the nation’s rice crop or seven million tonnes have been destroyed.

Seven industrial estates in Ayutthaya, Nonthaburi and Pathum Thani provinces have been forced to close, causing billions of dollars in damage besides disrupting international supply chains for industry with 650,000 people temporarily out of work.

The campaign, which started on Oct 27 ends on Nov 26. The Sri Lanka Buddhist Temple, Chetawan Thai Temple and Buddhist Maha Vihara are acting as collection centres for cash and goods.