BANGKOK — Workers and volunteers piled sandbags outside buildings in central Bangkok and erected barriers in its subway to ward off possible weekend flooding as high water that devastated parts of central Thailand flowed toward the low-lying metropolis.
While the government sought to reassure Bangkok’s 9 million people that the capital would be spared, it also sent sometimes confusing messages that raised anxieties and sent residents on shopping sprees to stockpile food, medicine and other essentials.
The worst floods in a half-century have submerged entire towns across Thailand’s central plains, devastating rice crops and halting hundreds of factories. About 8.2 million people in 61 of Thailand’s 77 provinces have been affected by the flooding, which has killed 283 people since July.
Authorities have warned that water rushing from the north could combine with rain and high tides to flood the capital. Some have said the flow would be so strong that authorities would be left with little choice but to watch the city drown.
The government said much of Bangkok lies behind a sturdy system of flood walls, dams and dikes that have been reinforced recently.
“I insist that the floods will only affect outer Bangkok and will not be widespread in other areas,” Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra said Friday.
Volunteer Troy Pannavaj said authorities were trying to pump as much water as possible into the Chao Phraya River — which snakes through the capital and into the sea — before high tides or heavy rains over the weekend slow the outflow.
“If these barriers break,” Pannavaj said, “this water will rush through Bangkok very fast.”
Buildings in many areas of the capital have stockpiled sandbags, while others have built protective walls from concrete and cinder blocks. City officials rushed to install steel flood barriers in the subway system.
