Kelly, who hosted the mostly-Peace Corps X-Mas dinner, has a nice house in Nakhon Si Tammarat Province. That's on the east side of the southern Thai peninsula, if you care. Well, while drinking on Christmas evening, we heard a loud noise like a fat, fat moth flying into one of those bug zappers that we all love to gaze into despite the many warnings about UV radiation that are plastered all over them.
So, the next day, Alec pointed out the source of the noise. A breaker above the bathroom light switch was blackened, its plastic cover distorted. The smell of burning plastic was fairly strong, along with occasional zapping sounds accompanied by glowing spots on the wiring.
In the end, to prevent the house burning down, or someone electrocuting themselves in the middle of the night, we cut the house power, slashed the line into the blown breaker, and wrapped it in duct tape to give us a false sense of security. You don't even want to know how we verified that the main breaker did, indeed, cut the power to this breaker.
Speaking of the main breaker, upon closer inspection I realized that it is, in fact, mounted to a sheet of plywood. Wood. As in, that stuff that burns when wires get really hot. Good job, Thailand.
But this is just one in a long series of safety issues that are nothing short of impressive.
As I walked to KR Mansion today, I passed some wiring on a phone pole. Among the many, unmarked blue wires was one which didn't go anywhere. It was capped with several layers of cheap electrical tape. It's at just about exactly the height of a curious child's fingers.
Last week, I watched construction on East Railey. A front-loader was being driven rather briskly by a gentleman who apparently didn't believe in glancing behind himself while backing up. I also noted that the vehicle battery was apparently belived best stored between the driver's legs, so as to more easily obstruct unimportant functions such as, say, stopping the vehicle.
Additionally, it's obvious that no signage is needed to warn pedestrians of the construction zone. After all, if you didn't notice the billowing clouds of tile dust and the ominous presence of the furiously-driven front-loader, you'd never notice any signage, right?
And don't even get me started at the bizarre holes in the sidewalks. Sidewalks appear to generally be a thin veneer placed over gaping pits, designed to strategically break and trap intoxicated tourists. As an aside, the favorite long-term fix for such holes in pedestrian thoroughfares seems to be a concrete tile, ideally a scant few millimeters larger than the hole which it covers.
Thailand: Safety First.