Crash and corkage: DDPM offical’s drink driving wreck raises glass and eyebrows
A Department of Disaster Prevention and Mitigation (DDPM) employee was accused of being drunk and disorderly at the wheel after causing an accident while driving an official company car. Several broken bottles of wine were found inside the woman’s vehicle after the accident.
The accusation against the woman, the assistant and acting director of Payao Provincial DDPM, was brought to the public’s attention on a Facebook page “Watchdog” (ปฏิบัติการหมาเฝ้าบ้าน). The page stated that the woman used a DDPM vehicle, TR Transformer II with a registration plate number 7กบ 5092, for personal purposes, not work-related.
According to the page, the woman drove the car home after attending a party at a restaurant called Wooden House Payao. The page accused the woman of drinking alcohol before driving which contributed to the road accident.
The presence of shattered bottles of wine inside the vehicle seemed to corroborate these claims.
The woman initially urged her team not to record the accident in an official report. However, when the situation came to light it compelled her to fabricate a falsehood to her superior officer. She told her employer that the accident occurred during a work-related activity.
The post drew a lot of attention from Thai netizens with many people urging relevant departments to conduct an investigation into the issue and disclose their findings to the public. However, as of now, no official organisations have provided clarifications regarding the situation.
This is not the first time that a drunk government officer hopped into an official car and ended up in an accident. A similar incident was reported in July when an alleged drunk police officer crashed his pickup belonging to the Royal Thai Police into three motorcycles on a road in the central province of Ayutthaya. The accident resulted in the tragic death of two people while two others suffered from severe injuries.
