I’ve seen these scenes before, and we will see them again.īangkok shares its vulnerability to climate change with coastal hubs from New York to Lagos-and especially with Asia’s post-colonial port cities: Shanghai, Karachi, Jakarta, Mumbai. Technology has turned us all into voyeurs of each other’s climate catastrophes. Now I’m watching rivers of debris created by Hurricane Ian flow through cities on Florida’s Gulf Coast. Then I checked social media, where videos showed buildings collapsing and people carrying their children through waist-high water. In Pakistan, heavy rain inundated a third of the country and harmed more than thirty-three million people-a number so staggering that I had to check several sources to make sure it was correct. Deadly flooding in the Marche region of Italy, I saw, turned the turquoise sea brown. This year, I watched in horror as many parts of Thailand flooded again.
The more devastating things are, the more I crave knowledge of them any phone can become my private-disaster war room, my glowing rectangle of contained calamity. Sometimes the updates come to me even when I’m not looking for them: because I follow the Twitter hashtag #น้ำท่วม, my feed is always, well, flooded. I am both thankful for the deluge of information and unsettled by its intimacy: with a few taps on a screen, I can watch faraway cities as they drown or burn. The Internet has made it far more convenient-maybe even compulsory-to broadcast the crises that we live through, and to witness others from afar. Even after I learned that the flooding had spared their homes, I couldn’t stop myself from tapping and scrolling. The data did not help me avert any catastrophes-I suspect that its main effect was to show my relatives that I was thinking of them-but I found it addictive.
Searches for specific neighborhoods and streets turned up photos of the flooding, which I sent to my relatives with a question: were their streets similarly engulfed? On Google Maps, I studied the traffic in places like Asoke and Phra Khanong, which is always horrid, and tried to tell whether it was getting worse because of rainwater that wouldn’t drain. I turned to Twitter for more granular information. The water levels near my aunt and cousin, my parents, and my ninety-three-year-old grandmother were blue. A map lit up with a rainbow of anxiety-blue squares for excessive water, bright red for flooding. That month, my alarm rang three times per day, and each time I picked up my tablet and tapped the ThaiWater app from the Hydro-Informatics Institute. Daytime in Brooklyn was night in Thailand, and, if floods approached the neighborhoods where my relatives live, I wanted to be able to rouse them from their beds and give them advance warning. North of my home city of Bangkok, the Chao Phraya River overflowed its banks.Īs the flooding spread through Bangkok, I decided to monitor the water levels online. A restaurant in Nonthaburi Province made international news for continuing to serve customers as the floodwaters swirled at their feet. In September, Tropical Storm Dianmu swept across the country and inundated some thirty provinces. In the weeks after the storm, it barely rained in Brooklyn-I had to douse the parched basil plants outside my window-but, in Thailand, the rains had really just begun. “Be careful, don’t get washed away with all those subway rats,” my mother warned, over a video call. Last summer, when remnants of Hurricane Ida raged through New York City and flooded parts of all five boroughs, my relatives in Thailand sent me videos of water rushing down the stairs of a subway station.
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