affected persons in the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia and Hungary, was fully covered. The generous response of donors, backed up by a similar gesture from local communities, allowed all aspects of the operation (emergency relief, post-emergency relief, and rehabilitation) to be effected. Problems with communications and lack of Disaster Preparedness know-how were surmounted and valuable less...

Increasingly, user generated content (UGC) in social media postings and their associated metadata such as time and location stamps are being used to provide useful operational information during natural hazard events such as hurricanes, storms and floods. The main advantage of these new sources of data are twofold. First, in a purely additive sense, they can provide much denser geographical cov...

Floods, the most common and hazardous natural event in Sri Lanka, are mainly caused by excessive rainfall received during monsoons resulting from development of low-pressure systems in the Bay of Bengal. From 2004 to 2014, Sri Lanka faced 23 flood occurrences with over 500 lives being lost and 9 million people affected. These floods caused an economic loss of USD 1 billion, reveals data availab...