Bridging times and cities
The road around the intersection would be closed at 6pm on Friday, April 22, 1988, and then reopen for traffic, the bridge completed, at 6am on Monday.
HRH Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn was scheduled to open the bridge at 3pm on Monday. It was a pre-arranged royal appointment, meaning the completion of the bridge could not be delayed.
“On Thursday before the work began, a TV journalist asked to interview me,” said Baron Nothomb. “I said, ‘OK, let’s do the interview on Monday after the bridge is completed’. They said, ‘No, we would like to interview you on Friday morning’ [though the interview would air on Monday]. I arrived very nervous at the TV station, but I had to have a big smile and said the operation was a success.
“The next morning at 8am I was at the site and work was in progress. From that moment on, I was almost convinced that everything would be OK. On Saturday afternoon, I had no fear anymore.”
During that week, the photo of the workin-progress bridge appeared on the front page of the Bangkok Post almost every day. On Apr 21, a headline read “Police expect chaos around closed roads”. The report cited statistics that over 15,000 cars pass the intersection every hour. On Apr 22, a headline read “Work begins on flyover”, with an image of a truck working at night near a half-finished structure. Then, on Sunday, Apr 24, a headline thundered, “Bridge assembled in one day”; the report went on to explain that the assembling process took just 24 hours and the final stretch on Sunday would be for “finishing touches”.
The report went on: “If the bridge is effective, the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration will consider installing more … on Rama IV.”
It was effective — actually, it became a precedent — and in 1989 the Thai-Japan flyover was erected, more or less in a similar arrangement. In the early 1990s, nearly 10 more flyovers were built around the city. The Thai-Belgian was not the first traffic flyover to ever be built in Bangkok (that was the Ratchatewi flyover) but it was the first whose positive impact on traffic conditions was so convincing that it won people over. On Apr 26, a headline on the front page of the Bangkok Post read simply “Belgian Bridge eases traffic”.
The 290m flyover became so indispensable to traffic in central Bangkok that when there was a fire underneath the structure last year and the bridge needed to close for repair for nearly two months, frustration was swift and palpable, and headlines containing the word “paralyse” were common.
Major maintenance took place in 2010, extending the durability of a structure that dated back to its first life in Brussels in 1958. For its 30th anniversary in Thailand, the Belgian embassy, the Chao Phya Abhai Raja Foundation and BeLu Thai approached the BMA for permission to decorate the flyover with Thai and Belgian flags on its 17 lampposts.
“Governor Assawin Kwanmueng said yes even before we gave him our presentation,” said Philip Coates of the Belgian-Luxembourg/Thai Chamber of Commerce (BeLu Thai). “We had to close the bridge from midnight to 6am just to put up the decoration. Six hours just to put up some flags, so imagine that they constructed the entire bridge in 60 hours.” Like many Belgians, Coates remembers driving across the original bridge in Brussels when he was a child, on the way to the seaside with his parents. “Everyone in Brussels remembers it. And to cross to the other side of town, we all had to use it.”
Baron Nothomb left his post in Bangkok in 1988 and went on to serve in Japan until 1997. On his first visit to Bangkok after a long absence, he knew where he would go first.
“I have to thank Ms Croymans again for bringing up the idea,” he says. “During my three-and-a-half years in Bangkok, the bridge was my main preoccupation. It’s like my baby. When I came to Bangkok this time, I knew where we’d go first. I went to look at my baby.”