Twitter Analysis of Bangkok Floods

UPDATE October 31 2011: We are seeing suppressed levels of tweeting in Bangkok but not collapsed levels, see score below.  Though the flooding is having an impact we are confident that the main central areas have managed to avoid massive devastation. 

Image from Twitter Search of Bangkok showing flooding

We are seeing tweeting levels dropping pretty dramatically from Bangkok and the Thai city is evacuated because of dramatic floods.

The above map shows several hours of distributed tweeting over Bangkok.



Though it is late in Bangkok we would still normally see much higher tweeting on our clima.me scale than just 10 for a city of millions of people. These scores are more in line with towns that major cities. Today we are seeing scores below 20 in areas that normally never go below 70 on our clima.me twitter density tracker.



Clearly Bangkok's communication infrastructure is taking a beating. We are also concerned that power supplies are damaged and that many people may be forced to leave their homes.

Update: We see the levels of tweeting rising in the early afternoon, so there is still significant mobile and broadband services in place, but levels are still significantly below normal for a city of this size. 


Though Bangkok is experiencing a major crisis to its ability to function as a city, we are not seeing anything on the scale of the Japan Tsunami.  We anticipate little if any loss of life, with much of Bangkok staying above water.  But there is evidence that Bangkok will suffer significant structural damage.  But it is also clear a large part of Bangkok's communications remain and a large group of people are making use of them.