At a meeting on Friday (January 9) of the provincial committee that approves development projects, he said, “After the case … at the airport camp, I visited the site and found that the worker’s camp … like other [similar] sites, lacks hygiene and safety.
“There are 1,500 camps across the island in each of which there are between 20 and 2,000 people living together.
“Developers of housing projects have to be more concerned about workers’ safety, cleanliness and hygiene. These people stay here long-term and live among us, so there is a risk of epidemics of disease when they live like this.”
The inspection team would be established in a matter of days, he said.
The Governor also told the committee that it must look more strictly at the location and history of land being developed.
“I’ve heard of many cases of wetlands and tin mine lakes being filled in, which is illegal.
“You have to make sure that there is no problem over the land before approving a housing project.
“Also, if the land is being filled legally, make sure that the infill comes from a legal source, not from a hill [where excavation] will later cause landslides.
“And construction must not block natural drainage, which will cause floods in the area,” he stressed.
He also told the committee to be very careful about approving housing projects by companies that already had developments elsewhere that are not yet complete.
“There have been complaints to the Damrongtham Centre from buyers who could not get their money back from developers [whose projects failed]. We have to protect them from the beginning.
“This is not just about individual buyers. It also has implications for the national economy. Such situations could result in banks suffering from non-performing loans, which in turn could bring about an economic crisis.”
The tom yam gung Asian financial collapse of 1997 was triggered in large part by overextended developers in Thailand who could not repay loans to banks.
As a result, by 1999, Thai banks were saddled with massive unpaid debt equalling half of all the loans they had made.