Fancy a Swim?

Unt

il Big got sick, Luk Koong gave his job little thought. At least four times a day for the past 15 years, the stocky Bangkok resident has stripped off his tattered shirt, donned a pair of antiquated goggles and slipped into the murky waters of one of the capital's klongs, or canals, to untangle debris from the propellers of riverboat taxis. The service takes no more than 10 minutes and nets him $2.50 for each dive. Luk Koong, 33, who was raised on the klongs and whose nickname in Thai means "shrimp baby," considered it easy money.

Until Big got sick. Big is Thai pop star Apichet Kittikorncharoen, the 21-year-old lead singer of the successful boy band D2B. On his way home from a rehearsal session in late July, Big accidentally drove his car into a klong. A passerby jumped into the water, pulled him from the car and performed CPR. And Big—to the relief of hordes of Thai teens—breathed again. Though badly shaken, he was expected to make a quick recovery.

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Or so his doctors initially thought. Four months and four brain operations later, Big is in a coma in a Bangkok hospital. The odds are that he will die—not from injuries sustained in the car crash but from an infection by a lethal fungus that blooms in Bangkok's klongs. The fungus entered Big's bloodstream when his heart stopped and his lungs filled with water. Undetected, it attacked blood vessels in Big's brain, causing a massive hemorrhage two weeks after the crash.

Luk Koong had never recognized the risks he took by submerging himself in the capital's fetid canals. "I guess I'd grown used to the smell," he says. "But after Big's accident, I started smelling it again, and I had second thoughts about jumping into the water every day." Other residents are also taking a newly wary whiff of the centuries-old klong network, which had inspired 17th century European missionaries to dub Bangkok the "Venice of the East." The city's 10 million residents produce 2.4 million cubic meters of wastewater per day but just 500,000 cubic meters are subsequently treated. The rest is simply poured into the klongs. As only 2% of homes in Bangkok are connected to proper sanitation systems, most of the effluent is raw sewage. Tossed into the brew are toxic chemicals, restaurant discharges, paper, cans, dead farm animals—and the occasional human corpse. Bacterial contamination is anywhere from 75 to 400 times above permissible limits, according to a city government study. Fish and plant life disappeared a decade ago.

This helps explain why Pornpot Kannasoot, the water-quality chief of the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration, fidgets when he talks about the issue. He says he has tried everything within his budget to fix the problem and, so far, nothing has worked. He has dredged canals and built two new wastewater treatment plants, with two, possibly three, more in the pipeline. Despite it all, lab tests show the water in the klongs did not improve. In fact, it got worse. The press and the public didn't seem to care, says Pornpot: "People just got used to it. I could go about my work quietly."

Until Big got sick. Now, klong coliform levels are printed in newspapers. Radio stations have been swamped with callers complaining about skin diseases they suspect they have contracted from riverboat taxi rides. Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra is demanding answers from bureaucrats. Pornpot has none. "The problem should have been dealt with 20 years ago when Bangkok's population began to boom," he says. "But it wasn't and now we are in serious trouble."

Beyond a complete overhaul of Bangkok's sewerage—an idea dismissed by the city government as too expensive—it seems the capital will have to live with the odor and the sight of black sludge beside homes and offices. Walee, 54, a shopkeeper in downtown Bangkok, installed a row of plants on the cement arches that span the klong next to her store. In bloom, she says, the flowers mask the toxic mess. "When I look at the flowers, I see the klong of my youth," she says, "when it was clear and filled with fish and when my mother scolded me for spending too much time swimming in it."

Keeping those memories alive is increasingly difficult. When the wind blows hard enough, her potted plants topple into the klong. She used to pay kids to jump in and retrieve them. Now, no amount of money can entice them into the water. Why? "Because Big got sick," she says.