Thailand flood death toll exceeds 500

Polluted, black floodwaters crept to within a few kilometres of Bangkok's downtown core on Sunday as the death toll from Thailand's worst floods in half a century climbed past 500.

About a fifth of the capital was underwater, and a quarter of the city's districts — including four more added Sunday — were subject to either total or partial evacuation orders as the flood levels became too deep for residents to remain.

The flooding continued to lurch toward Bangkok's central commercial and tourist zone, and has already started overtaking the areas around subway and skytrain stations at the periphery of the city's rapid transit system. 

Train service has not yet been affected, but the inundation illustrates how far flooding has progressed into the city and how powerless the government is to stop it.

Bangkok's Chatuchak Market, a popular tourist attraction that sees 200,000 visitors on a typical weekend, was virutally deserted Saturday and Sunday as vendors and consumers stayed away because of the floods.

Relentless rainfall has pummelled vast swaths of Thailand since late July, swamping the country and killing 506 people, according to the latest government statistics. Most of those killed have drowned, while a handful of people have died from flood-related electrocutions.

No deaths have been reported in Bangkok. The nearby province of Ayutthaya, which has been submerged for more than one month, has the highest toll with 90 reported dead.

Floodwaters have begun receding in some provinces north of the capital, and a major cleanup is planned in Ayutthaya this week. But the runoff has massed around Bangkok and completely submerged some of the city's outer neighbourhoods.

The flooding has not affected the country's resort-laden southern towns and islands like Phuket and Ko Samui. But a rash of flight, hotel and conference cancellations in Bangkok has those areas worried they could see a plunge in visits from tourists daunted by conditions in the capital.

"There's a bit of a campaign going on now to make sure that people who may have holidays booked in there understand that it is still possible to fly into the Bangkok airport and then get your connecting flight off to all of these popular resorts," CBC contributor Michael McAuliffe said from Bangkok.  

Over the past two decades, Bangkok's much enlarged and improved drainage system has increasingly been able to siphon off water during monsoon seasons with average rainfall. But amid Thailand's worst flooding since the Second World War, that system is being put to its greatest test yet.

On Saturday, Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra told a radio audience that a plan to be put before her cabinet on Tuesday would allocate 100 billion baht ($3.3 billion) for post-flood reconstruction.

Yingluck's government has come under fire for failing to predict the threat to the capital. Residents also have been frustrated by widely different assessments of the flooding situation from the prime minister, Bangkok's governor and the country's top water experts and officials.