The Royal Irrigation Department (RID) has warned that salt water could head inland on Wednesday due to a high tide at sea, affecting fresh water rivers and basins.
Suthep Noiparoj, deputy-director general of the RID, explained that the department and the Metropolitan Waterworks Authority (MWA) plan to release fresh water from the Chao Phraya and Rama VI dams to try and minimise the damaging effects that salt water can have on rivers and basins.
In the Chao Phraya River, 75 to 80 cubic metres of water will be drawn from the Chao Praya dam per second and 20 to 25 per second from the Rama VI dam in Ayutthaya province, he said.
“We can assure you that there is enough fresh water to cope with the situation,” he added.
Not only has the RID stored sufficient amounts of fresh water for consumption, but there will be enough resources for the agriculture sector as well, he said.
The level of salt in the water used for farming must not exceed two grammes per litre.
At the moment, these levels do not exceed one gramme per litre, he said.
“We will not let farmers suffer as a result of this high tide,” he said, explaining that the RID had retained about 3.8 billion cubic metres of fresh water for agricultural purposes in the 22 provinces along the Chao Praya River.
Reserves will be made available on May 1, 2015.
Furthermore, the MWA has set up a water management crisis centre to monitor salt and water levels, its governor Thanasak Watanathana announced.
The centre is part of the policy of the Interior Ministry, he said, and has been operating since Oct 29 last year.
“We are releasing about 100 cubic metres of fresh water per second at the moment and will be able to address the salt levels problem at the end of this month,” he assured.
Mr Thanasak said people should try and save water and encouraged locals to have their pipes checked for leaks.
The daily use of fresh water is approximately 16 million cubic metres per day nationwide, he said.
Throughout the country, the prognosis for 2015 is rather bleak, Ratana Kitchawan, governor of the Provincial Waterworks Authority (PWA) warned.
She predicts that the drought this year will be worse than previous years as levels of fresh water have diminished.
Water levels have dropped by about a million cubic metres since last year in the Sirikit and Pa Sak dams, water management authorities estimate.
“High salt levels last year were a huge problem.
"We had to buy water from East Water Co, which has access to preserved basins,” she said.
However, the PWA claims it has learned its lesson from droughts in the past two years and has continuously invested in finding alternative sources of water.
In 2014, the PWA spent 380 million baht on infrastructure to address the drought or salt levels for the long term.
The agency has connected pipelines between several of its water treatment plants to be able to divert resources to populations in need.