Paetongtarn visits flood-hit South to oversee relief operations
The prime minister and her husband visited Nakhon Si Thammarat and Surat Thani to oversee relief efforts after days of severe flooding
Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra and her husband flew down to Nakhon Si Thammarat and Surat Thani on Tuesday to follow up on the flood relief operations.
After chairing the weekly Cabinet meeting at Government House, Paetongtarn and her husband, Pitaka Suksawat, boarded a military plane at the Don Mueang military airport at noon.
The flight landed in Nakhon Si Thammarat at 1pm, after which the PM and her husband made their way to the provincial hall for a briefing on the situation.
During the meeting, the premier instructed relevant government agencies to expedite relief efforts to help people caught in the floods.
The southern provinces of Nakhon Si Thammarat, Surat Thani, Chumphon and Phatthalung have been hit with flash floods since Saturday after two days of torrential rain.
After the meeting, Paetongtarn visited residents of Soi Pattanakarn Kukwang 10 in Nakhon Si Thammarat’s Muang district to hand out relief bags. She was scheduled to visit people being sheltered at the Tha Chang district office at 5pm, where she was to be briefed on the situation in the adjacent province.
The premier and her delegation are scheduled to fly back to Bangkok later in the night.
Several provinces in the South of Thailand have been hit by floods since late last month, but Paetongtarn was busy organising a mobile Cabinet meeting in Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai. Her failure to show up in the South prompted critics to allege that she was only interested in her home province of Chiang Mai.
However, Paetongtarn shot back saying she was not ignoring the flood victims in the South, but that her mobile Cabinet meeting and related missions had been planned months in advance, so she had to maintain the schedule.
