Thailand Science and Technology Minister Plodprasop Suraswadi says that a repeat of last year’s Great Thailand Floods has only a 1% chance of happening in 2012.
Plodprasop is considered a frontrunner to be Pheu Thai’s candidate for governor of Bangkok in the 2013 election if he does a good job of handling floods this year.
He said that the 1% estimation was drawn from computer models developed by his ministry and two foreign consultancies, DHI from Denmark and Deltares from the Netherlands
“The model makes us confident that the chance for a massive flood is less than 1% for this year,” he said,according to the Bangkok Post. “We don’t need to worry about another big flood for at least 70-80 years.”
Are those words that will come back to haunt him? We’ll just have to check back in September.
Plodprasob has been wrong before – he spurred panic in Bangkok last year when he called a flood alert for the capital that turned out to be wrong – and he was criticized for his general handling of the crisis.
