RANGSIT, Thailand — Beside a wall of white sandbags that has become a front line in Thailand’s battle to prevent an epic season of monsoon floods from reaching Bangkok, needlefish swim through knee-high water inside Sawat Taengon’s home.
On one side, a cloudy brown river pours through a canal diverting water around the Thai capital, just to the south. On the other side, homes just like his are unscathed.
Whether floodwaters breach fortified barriers like these this weekend will decide whether Bangkok will be swamped or spared. As of late Saturday at least, the alarmed metropolis of glass-walled condominiums and gilded Buddhist temples remained unscathed, and authorities were confident it would narrowly escape disaster.
“We just hope it doesn’t go higher,” said Sawat, 38, a construction worker whose home had the misfortune of being inside the vast sandbag wall, which runs at least 2.5 miles along a canal in Rangsit, just north of Bangkok’s city limits.
Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra’s government says most of Bangkok, which lies about 6 feet above sea level, sits safely behind an elaborate system of flood walls, canals, dikes and seven underground drainage tunnels that were completed over the past year.
The latest floods are posing the biggest test those defenses have ever faced.
Adisak Kantee, deputy director of Bangkok’s drainage department, reported encouraging signs Saturday. Runoff from the north had decreased slightly, and high tides that could have impeded critical water flows to the Gulf of Thailand have not been severe as expected, he said.
“The worst is not over,” said army Col. Wirat Nakjoo. “The dams are at near full capacity and there’s still a lot of water that needs to be released.”
The government says the floods, which have killed 297 people, are the worst to hit the Southeast Asian kingdom in half a century.
Flooding in neighboring Cambodia, with less than one-quarter of Thailand’s 68 million population, has killed at least 247 people, said Keo Vy, spokesman for Cambodia’s National Committee for Disaster Management. China on Saturday began delivering the first of about $7.8 million in flood relief aid, he said.
