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Thai seaside safer, but tourists
stay away
By Marwaan
Macan-Markar
PHUKET, Thailand - The
unveiling of a tsunami warning system in Thailand
has not attracted tourists back to the sandy
playgrounds of Phuket or the nearby islands. Nor
has the surge of new advertisements portraying
Phuket as a beach resort that has regained its
legendary beauty after the shores were cleaned of
the December 26 tsunami's destructive trail.
According to The Nation, tourist arrivals
at Phuket's airport during the first two months of
this year hit a low of 48,000, as opposed to the
248,000 holidaymakers who flew in during the same
period last year. The economic loss from the weak
inflow of tourists in places such as Phuket, Phang
Nga and Krabi has been estimated at 43 billion
baht (US$1.07 billion), according to the Tourism
Authority of Thailand.
In an attempt to
make the area more tourist friendly, a system that
includes beachside loudspeakers is being unveiled
by Patong's local government as part of a tsunami
early-warning system. Were a tsunami to head
toward the coast, the loudspeakers that were
installed in mid-February would be activated to
warn the public.
Now, aside from the
pleasant sound of waves rolling off the Andaman
Sea and crashing on the shore, tourists heading to
the beaches of Patong on this popular resort
island are being exposed to a steady flow of
announcements in Thai from nearby loudspeakers.
In addition to the hum of passing cars and
the burst of speeding motorcycles, holidaymakers
have to take in such broadcasts between 10am and
2:30pm, times the Patong municipality has been
assigned to run local news bulletins for the
benefit of both locals and foreigners on the
sweeping coast.
"We are broadcasting news
because we want to give people good information,"
Chairat Sukkaban, Patong's deputy mayor, told
reporters. "This will make the Thai people more
relaxed."
To augment the loudspeakers,
three separate towers with sirens that can reach
up to 120 decibels each and can be heard up to two
kilometers away are being installed to cover
Patong's bay. The sirens will be part of a more
sophisticated network connected to Thailand's
National Disaster Warning Center (NDWC), currently
being set up in Nonthaburi, on the northern
outskirts of Bangkok.
"There will be no
person in Phuket to turn the switch [for the
sirens] on. It is fully automated," said Pat
Neely, an expatriate from the United States
helping to coordinate the early-warning system.
"These sirens are used elsewhere for disasters
like floods and chemical spills and for tornado
warnings in the US."
According to Chairat,
the network of sirens and loudspeakers has placed
Patong ahead of other beaches along Thailand's
Andaman coast in terms of tsunami preparedness.
"This [warning network] is the first on
Phuket and will be ready by April 15," the deputy
mayor told Inter Press Service. "Other places will
get it later."
The NDWC intends to set up
50 sirens in the six provinces along Thailand's
southwestern coast, Smith Dharmasaroja, the
center's chairman, told a seminar early this
month. The center's early-warning system plan also
includes directions for people in the six
provinces to follow if an evacuation is ordered
and a new environmental and zoning system to make
areas "safer and more tourist friendly", according
to a report in The Nation, an English-language
daily.
Close to 5,400 people, about half
of them tourists, were killed by the tsunami that
struck Thailand's six southern provinces along the
Andaman coast on December 26. Aside from Phuket,
the other provinces affected were Krabi, Phang
Nga, Ranong, Satun and Trang.
The pain
from the dramatic drop in the number of tourists
is severe, particularly for women such as Dam, who
earns money giving massages on Patong beach.
"After the tsunami there is nobody here, or maybe
one or two people wanting massages a week," said
Dam.
Before the December tsunami, she had
four to five customers a day, a number that had
kept marginally rising or falling during the 18
years she plied her skill in the art of Thai
massage.
The Manila-based Asian
Development Bank had women like Dam in mind when
it revealed in a report released in early April
that 24,000 more Thais will join the ranks of the
country's poor due to the affect of the tsunami on
the economy.
Tourists should start
thinking about the people who survived, for they
need these tourists back in order to rebuild their
lives, Wichit Na-Ranong, president of the Tourism
Council of Thailand, told reporters.
"There should be no feeling of guilt to
have a holiday here now that 100 days have passed
since the tsunami," Wichit stressed. The tsunami
early-warning system being put in place near
beaches like Patong is another reason for tourists
to return, he added. "It is more safe now."
(Inter Press Service) |
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