Destinations known | Thai holiday island Koh Samui’s fresh water shortage is blamed on ‘rapid development’, but it is a 30-year-old problem
- The Thai holiday island of Koh Samui is facing a shortage of fresh water, blamed on increased tourist demand, but this was already a problem in the mid-1990s
- Meanwhile, a tourism ad campaign for the Philippines featuring photos from other countries has left the island nation embarrassed
“Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink.”
It seems unlikely The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, is well known in Koh Samui but the 1798 poem’s most famous (and most incorrectly quoted) line is apt.
Surrounded by the azure waters of the Gulf of Thailand, 75km (47 miles) from the Thai mainland, the holiday island (permanent population: more than 70,000) “is facing a shortage of fresh water due to a lack of rainfall and increased demand”, reports the Bangkok Post.
With public and private reservoirs drying up, the island “only has enough local freshwater supplies for just 30 days”. And that was 14 days ago!
With this year’s El Nino weather system likely to reduce rainfall even more than usual and the high tourism season just about to kick in, the situation is likely to worsen, with those least able to pay the increasing bills for supplies now being piped in from Surat Thani, on the mainland, expected to suffer the most.
Samui welcomed a million tourists in the first five months of this year, reports the Bangkok Post, and, perhaps wary of turning off that particular tap, the Thai newspaper gives few further details other than to say that the lack of water on the island has raised costs for tourism businesses, too, and that “any time water does not flow from the tap, [residents] must pay 250 [US$7] to 300 baht for about 2,000 litres (440) of water for daily use”.