A clip of rapid runoff from the Pong Samsip and Khlong Loi reservoirs, north of Bang Saphan district, went viral on the social media early this week along with rumours that dams had been opened.

A few days later, the Royal Irrigation Department issued a statement to say that the runoff pictured was actually from the reservoirs’ spillway, not from the lakes. But by that time another clip had gone viral. This one featured an interview with the chief of the Royal Irrigation Department’s Water Management and Hydrology Office, who announced that the authority had no power to issue any warnings, manage evacuations or set up help centres. Its task instead was to report the water situation to relevant agencies. Whether those reports were then used to issue a warning was down to the administrative leader in Bang Saphan.

Although 12 southern provinces have been suffering floods for weeks, residents in the more northerly Bang Saphan had never experienced severe inundation prior to this week.

Their desperate situation was exacerbated by the fact they were not alerted to the potential crisis by any state agency and so had no time to either move their possessions or evacuate to higher ground.

Royal Irrigation Office 14, which is responsible for Bang Saphan district, clarified that it had been closely monitoring the water situation and issuing regular announcements for Prachuap Khiri Khan provincial authorities. This practice accords with protocols under the National Disaster Prevention and Mitigation Plan.

Yet if local authorities were being advised of the situation, why did they not keep the public informed?

The crisis has strong echoes of the 2011 floods, where a similar lack of coordination – and perhaps conflict – between state agencies resulted in a bill for damages that soared to hundreds of billion of baht.

The flooding in the South has so far cost 36 lives and affected almost 1 million people, with more than 300,000 homes, over 100 hospitals and over 1,000 schools inundated. More than 200 roads and 59 bridges have also seen flood damage.

The Thai Chamber of Commerce forecasts the cost of the damage will be Bt22.36 billion – not as severe as 2011’s floods, but still enough to knock 0.1 per cent off gross domestic product growth this year.

The lesson is that lack of coordination among authorities delays management of a crisis and also solutions in the aftermath, costing us all more in the long run. Meanwhile ordinary people suffer needlessly in the vacuum where state agencies’ coordination should be.

State agencies need to first make disaster-prevention a cross-agency priority and cooperate better to provide well-organised crisis management. By maintaining a silo mentality, agencies fail to communicate with each other and leave gaps in crisis response where we can least afford them.