Thai man’s jet ski stunt fuels anger in ‘unequal’ Bangkok as poor hit hardest by floods

A Thai man who zipped a jet ski across flooded Bangkok streets received a suspended jail sentence on Monday for causing a public nuisance after he used the capital – where tens of thousands of households remain submerged – as a backdrop for social media content.

The stunt, widely shared on social media on Sunday evening, became a conduit for public anger over both the handling of the flood response and how climate calamities are experienced unevenly in the capital of one of Asia’s least equal countries.

On Monday, a Bangkok court gave Sorn Keadsiri, the 27-year-old son of an actress, a suspended 15-day jail sentence and a small fine after he did doughnuts – spinning the jet ski in tight circles in the water – on a flooded Bangkok street while his friend filmed the antics.

“The seized jet ski will also be confiscated,” Makkasan Metropolitan Police said in a statement revealing the court’s decision.

Sorn said he had recently returned to Thailand and a foreign friend had cajoled him into the stunt to lighten the people’s suffering from the floods, local media reported.

But the episode has been widely seen as an example of the insensitivity of some of the city’s wealthy to the suffering of its poor as they reel from the worst floods in 15 years.

“People [who make viral content] could never truly understand or experience what it’s like to actually suffer from flooding. Instead of using their greater resources to help others, they use them to make content,” Thanayut Na Ayutthaya, a rapper better known as Elevenfinger, told This Week in Asia.

The social activist said the unusually heavy rain was only one part of the problem, pointing to growing resentment over corruption, waste and centralised power that meant resources were given out by the government, limiting local solutions to chronic problems like poor drainage.

“What we’ve seen is how the state spends our taxes. In the end, it’s always us, the people, who suffer most,” he said. “Same rain, unequal floods, unequal power, and the people are the ones who pay.”

While the floods have been indiscriminate, hitting some wealthy Bangkok neighbourhoods, richer families often build higher in a notoriously flood-prone city, resulting in run-off from their properties pouring into the drains at road level where the homes of the less wealthy are located.

A Bangkok contractor in one of the city’s more affluent areas said her clients built upwards ahead of each monsoon season.

“Those without the means – who cannot afford to raise their foundations or renovate to keep the water out – are left in the lowest spots. When Bangkok floods, that water has to wait for the public drainage system to carry it away,” she told This Week in Asia, requesting anonymity due to her customer base.

“And the houses in the lowest spots are, inevitably, the ones where the water sits longest.”

The city’s working and middle classes have lost income as shops closed and even the gig economy came to a crawl, as the surging waters caught city authorities off guard.

Meanwhile, those hit hardest have struggled without clean water and fresh food for a third day on Monday, including in two areas in eastern Bangkok where the floods have remained neck-high.

“People feel angry when they hear ‘I’m so rich’,” said Elevenfinger, whose Klong Toei slum community was flooded. “Every car that’s submerged – some people spent years saving just to buy one. But there’s no compensation, no basic relief. By the time recovery comes, they will have already lost everything.”

City Hall has declared Bangkok a disaster zone. Floodwaters still refuse to drain in the capital’s worst-hit eastern parts, exacerbated by continued rain.

Parts of Bangkok and the surrounding provinces remained submerged on Monday as flood-stricken communities faced fresh perils from electrocution and encountering snakes flushed out by the drains.

Late on Sunday, Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul was given a close-up view of the simmering resentment that the floods have caused.

As he toured Khlong Chan flats, a residential block submerged since early Saturday in Bang Kapi district, some residents catcalled the prime minister, a scion of a construction empire who heads a conservative government stuffed with multimillionaires.

Other trapped residents, who had no running water, electricity or fresh food, ironically chanted “I can’t wait to be rich”, a parody of Anutin’s election slogan where he declared that votes for him would ensure everybody became “so rich they wouldn’t know what to do with the money”.