Heavy Rain Floods Historic Temple and School in Ratchaburi
Heavy rain flooded Pak Tho district and Mueang Ratchaburi, submerging a nearly 100‑year‑old temple and a local school. Water rose to knee‑level, reaching one metre in spots, and even waist‑deep inside the temple’s vihara, endangering historic Buddha images. Volunteers, monks, and residents scrambled to lay sandbags as the inundation spread rapidly.
Heavy rain caused floodwaters to inundate the Wat Yai Ang Thong temple, a historic structure built in 1927 (BE 2470) that features Ayutthaya‑style architecture. The water reached knee depth, rising to one metre in places and even waist‑deep in some areas, submerging mats and chairs inside the vihara and nearly touching the base of two ancient sandstone Buddha images covered in lacquer and gold leaf. The images, whose heads had been stolen in a theft before 2010 and later recast by the abbot and villagers, are now surrounded by water that has seeped both outside and inside the vihara, whose walls show old red bricks, moss‑covered patches, a deteriorating roof, and roots of bodhi and banyan trees that have cracked the structure. Abbot Phra Athikkhon Samayot Yasothoro said he had been out on his morning alms round when the water arrived rapidly around 6 a.m., forcing him to call community members for help. Seventy‑year‑old Nang Plieuwan Phuga, who has lived in the area for over seventy years, said the temple had never flooded like this before; she noted that former rice fields have been replaced by villages, leaving the water nowhere to go but to pool here, and that even the school had never flooded until this year.
