Warangkana Chomchuen NBC News 9 Jan 10;
SAMUT SAKORN, Thailand – Some people envied Voraphol Duanglomchan for living so close to nature.
His house stood on a muddy shore, overlooking the seemingly infinite sea of the Gulf of Thailand. At night he was lulled to sleep by rolling waves. It was all nice and romantic until one day the lullaby stopped, and he woke up to his worst nightmare.
The initially benign-seeming waves led to a series of storms that torn his house apart plank by plank. At first Voraphol tried to repair the damage after each storm. But after four years, he finally gave up and abandoned the house before it crumbled.
Today, solitary poles are the only thing left where his house once stood. During the two decades since Voraphol’s house was destroyed, he has seen almost 800 yards of land in his village erode. And he has watched as dozens of households in neighboring seaside communities have been forced to relocate further inland every three to five years.
"I began to question how often we would have to move," he said. "Endlessly?"
Voraphol, 49, decided to fight back. With a background in fine art, Voraphol had little expertise in physics or engineering, so he learned what he could by observing how other communities battled the tides.
He found that breakwaters – structures that reduce wave intensity and allow trapped sediments to build up – were widely adopted in Thailand. Most of the time, the breakwaters were made from cement poles, crushed rocks or sandbags. But with limited money, Voraphol experimented with cheaper, unconventional materials until he found the right one: old bamboos ready to be thrown away by farmers.
He tied bamboo poles together like screens and erected them in the seabed. While the round contour of the bamboo softens the force of the waves, the space between each pole allows sediments to permeate and pile up behind the bamboo screens. The use of bamboo offered an innovative local solution to tackle a growing national problem.
Rising tides
Thailand's 23 coastal provinces are facing severe erosion; already one-fifth of the country's coastline has been eroded over the last 30 years, according to Dr. Thanawat Jarupongsakul, a geography professor at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, who has been researching on coastal erosion since the 1990s.
Samut Sakorn, Voraphol's province, is located 20 miles south of Bangkok on the Chao Phraya River Delta and ranks in the top five of the country’s worst-hit provinces. Thanawat says that both nature and humankind have contributed to coastal erosion.
Fiercer monsoon seasons, twice annually, have driven waves to rise as high as 13 feet, while human actions, like upstream damming, have decreased sediment supply, he said. Also, Bangkok and other metropolitan areas have been sinking due to underground water pumping. And the destruction of mangrove forests in order to pave the way for shrimp and salt farms has hastened erosion.
As a result, Thailand’s sea level has been rising at a rate of 30 millimeters a year, more than 10 times higher than the world average, according to Thanawat.
"Currently we are losing 30 yards of coastal area every year, a big jump from five yards 40 years ago," said Thanawat. "If we don’t have any measures in place, it’s possible that by 2030 Thailand will lose twice as much."
‘Popular wisdom that works’
Voraphol’s use of bamboo to fight the rising water raised eyebrows initially, but not funding. Government agencies were reluctant to support his idea, saying they had no concrete evidence that it would work.
"I felt dejected. People thought I was crazy," Voraphol said. "For years it’s been like that, despair and hope. But I carried on. Someone has to do it."
His best shot arrived at a national conference on coastal erosion a few years ago. After reviewing the data he had collected, academics at the conference thought his idea seemed sound. It wasn’t long before a government agency, the Department of Marine and Coastal Resources, decided to grant Voraphol financial and technical support, enabling him to expand the bamboo barrier to three rows stretching more than a mile along the shore.
"We can see that in the past two years trapped sediments behind the bamboo rows have reached 3-feet high and added up 100 yards of land," said Nitat Poovatanakul, the department’s deputy chief.
"It’s a popular wisdom that works. It was initiated and accepted by the locals, which is essentially a good start for sustainable development," added Nitat.
Hundreds of mangrove saplings were planted behind each bamboo row, with the hope that in the next four to five years the new mangrove forests will act as buffer zone.
Now, people stop by to talk to Voraphol, learn about his project and debate whether or not the bamboo barrier will work for their own community. At the very least, they get encouragement from Voraphol.
"I believe if we have the power to destroy nature, we should be able to rebuild it too," said Voraphol. "We don’t necessarily need a complex method. We just need to understand the nature itself."
