A journey from a nor’easter in New York to flooded streets in Bang Kapi became a reminder that when systems are stretched, resilience often comes down to ordinary people simply deciding to help.
Sometimes the most memorable part of a journey begins after the flight lands.
My journey home to Bangkok began at New York’s JFK Airport on Sunday, September 27, 2026, as a nor’easter battered the East Coast with heavy rain, flooding and travel disruption.
At that point, simply getting off the ground felt like an accomplishment.
My first flight, operated by EVA Air as part of my Thai Airways itinerary, took me from New York to Taipei. After the long trans-Pacific journey, I arrived in Taiwan expecting the final leg to Bangkok to be relatively straightforward.
It wasn’t.
Five hours in Taipei
Thai Airways flight TG637 from Taipei to Bangkok, originally scheduled for 7:55 a.m., was moved to 1 p.m., a delay of just over five hours.
Normally, five hours in an airport is an inconvenience. This time, it felt different.
Back in Bangkok, I already knew that my neighborhood in Bang Kapi had flooded. What I did not know was how badly my home had been affected, or whether I would even be able to reach it.
Still, I was optimistic.
After many years working in Thailand’s tourism and hospitality industry, I was familiar with airline crisis planning and emergency procedures. I have always believed that when normal operations break down, good crisis management comes down to two things: solving the problem and communicating clearly while you solve it.
We finally landed at Suvarnabhumi Airport late in the afternoon on Monday, September 28.
After a very long walk through the terminal, immigration turned out to be relatively painless. I cleared it in around 15 to 20 minutes.
One immigration officer, who had just begun his shift, offered me an unexpected piece of advice. I might want to go home, he suggested, and return another day for my luggage. The wait could be five hours.
I had already been travelling for more than a day. I was exhausted. But with my home potentially flooded and no certainty about what I would find when I finally reached Bang Kapi, leaving my luggage behind did not seem like an attractive option.
So I waited.
Bags delayed, journey not over
The baggage hall told its own story.
Bags were piled around the area. Passengers waited around the carousels, trying to work out what was happening.
There was nowhere obvious to sit. I was not offered water. I received no text message, email or app notification explaining the situation. During my wait, I personally saw no Thai Airways representative providing information to passengers in the baggage area.
By 6:17 p.m., the display above the carousel was showing two words that summed up the situation: BAG DELAY.
After approximately two hours, my bags appeared. They were intact and everything was there. Considering what some other passengers were experiencing, I felt fortunate.
By the time I walked out of Suvarnabhumi Airport, it was past 8 p.m.
The flight was over.
Getting home was about to become the real journey.
Finding a taxi was only the first challenge. I needed a driver willing to attempt the trip into an area of Bangkok badly affected by flooding.
Eventually, one agreed.
We tried several approaches toward my neighborhood, but street after street became impassable. The water was simply too deep for a normal taxi. Eventually, we admitted defeat.
The driver dropped me at a petrol station, where I stood with my luggage trying to work out what to do next.
Then another driver appeared.
He was driving an SUV and told me that his own home near mine had been badly flooded for days. He had been sleeping in his vehicle at the petrol station for the past three nights.
Yet he was willing to try to get me home.
That small act of kindness changed everything.
By now Bangkok was dark, streets were flooded and nobody could be certain which routes remained passable.
There was still more than 20 centimetres of water across the elevated parts of the road. Cars had been moved onto higher ground as residents tried to protect their vehicles.
We continued until we reached ABAC Hua Mak Campus.
That was as far as the SUV could safely go.
The last mile
My house was still roughly 300 metres away.
The soi ahead was dark, with very little lighting. We could not tell how deep the water became farther down the road.
I looked at the driver.
He looked at me.
And I decided to walk.
I lifted my luggage and stepped into the floodwater.
At first, it reached my ankles. Then my knees. In places, it rose much higher, approaching a metre deep.
The water was cold. I could not see what was underneath it, and falling was not an option. Apart from the danger, one wrong step would have put both me and my luggage into the floodwater.
The going was slow, and after making it perhaps halfway down the road, exhaustion was catching up with me.
Then Bangkok stepped in.
An Assumption University student saw me struggling and came over to help carry my bags. I will not forget the kindness.
A short time later, another Good Samaritan arrived in a pickup truck.
Throughout the flooded neighborhood, pickup trucks had effectively become community transportation, moving people along streets ordinary cars could no longer navigate.
The driver stopped, loaded me and my luggage aboard, and carried me the remaining distance toward home.
By the time I finally reached my house, I was wet, exhausted and battered by nearly two days of travel.
There was clear evidence that floodwater had entered the property.
But I was lucky.
The water had receded enough for me to get inside, and I began cleaning up as best I could.
A community keeps moving
In the days since, I have realized that my experience was hardly unique.
Across Bang Kapi and Ramkhamhaeng, people have simply been getting on with what needs to be done.
Assumption University, itself surrounded by floodwater during the final examination period, has been working to keep assessments moving while supporting students, staff and members of the surrounding community with food, medicine and practical assistance.
Nearby businesses have found their own ways to keep going. At Barani, a Burmese restaurant near campus, staff continued preparing and delivering meals, in some cases wading through deep floodwater to reach customers.
There are countless stories like these.
They are stories of taxi drivers, restaurant workers, students, university staff, pickup truck owners, neighbors and strangers doing what they can with what they have.
That, for me, is the bigger tourism and hospitality story.
Crisis-management manuals matter. Emergency operations centers matter. Communication matters enormously.
There are lessons to be learned from what happened at Suvarnabhumi, particularly about communicating with passengers when normal operations break down. For Thai Airways and others in the travel industry, this disruption offers an opportunity to examine what worked, what did not and how crisis-management systems can respond even better next time.
Perhaps next time, communication will be faster, information more visible and support easier for passengers to find.
But no crisis plan can anticipate every flooded road, stranded passenger or worried resident.
Eventually, resilience comes down to people.
A taxi driver whose own home was flooded still tried to get me closer to mine.
Another driver, despite effectively being displaced himself, was willing to venture into the affected area and initially refused to take payment.
An Assumption University student stopped to help an exhausted traveller carry his luggage.
Pickup truck owners turned their vehicles into unofficial community transport.
Restaurant workers waded through floodwater carrying meals.
Nobody had been assigned to help me.
They simply did.
Thailand’s tourism industry has talked about resilience for years. Sometimes it can sound like another industry buzzword.
This week, I saw what it actually looks like.
It looks like people standing in floodwater and finding a way forward.
After travelling halfway around the world through storms, delays and floods, that was the Thailand I came home to.
