da: The New York Times
Villagers here avoid walking in the rain because they say it burns their skin and causes their hair to fall out. They have trouble breathing at night when, they say, factories release toxic fumes. And they are terrified by what studies show are unusually high cancer rates.Map Ta Phut is the heart of Thailand’s industrial underbelly, an area rarely seen by the millions of tourists who visit the country every year. Jutting out into the Gulf of Thailand, the industrial zone is on the scale of a midsize city — only instead of office buildings and apartments, there are block after block of tangled tubes of steel, vats of chemicals and towering, fire-breathing gas flares.
Two years ago, a group of residents decided to take their health grievances to the courts, a relatively rare move in Thailand, where street demonstrations are the…