Disaster response
A live picture of an unfolding flood from social and news media, in local languages and down to neighbourhood level. See where impact is worst and which areas and roads are affected, in the first hours when official channels are still incomplete.
A live picture in the first hours, before official channels catch up
Disaster and humanitarian responders have to act fast: they need to know what is happening, where impact is worst, and how to reach it. During a flood, first-hand reports appear in social and news media before official channels have a complete picture, but checking that by hand is far too slow.
FloodTags collects, classifies and locates those public reports automatically, turning them into a live picture of which areas and roads are affected and the effect on people and facilities, within seconds to minutes, in local languages and down to neighbourhood level. It shows where impact is reported, not where it is absent, and sources are not exhaustive, so it is used to direct attention and validated before life-safety decisions.
How it's used
Real-time situational awareness
Follow an unfolding event from your operations centre in the first hours, in local languages and down to neighbourhood level, as people report impact across your area before official channels have a complete or timely picture of what is happening.
Find where impact is worst
See which locations, communities and roads are most affected, including blocked or impassable roads, bridges and traffic, and the impact on people and on public and critical facilities, so you can direct response and relief where it is needed most.
Rapid situation briefs
Generate a short, on-demand brief of the context, causes and impacts of the event in seconds, ready to share across teams and with partners, and refresh it as the picture changes through the first hours of the response.
Match your response scenario
Match the live media picture, where flooding is reported, which areas and roads are affected and how severe it appears, to your pre-prepared scenarios, so you can set the corresponding response plan in motion sooner and with more confidence.
One subscription, used live or as reports
For disaster response, clients most commonly use Operational Mode with a response-time guarantee, working the event live as it unfolds. The same subscription can also deliver reports, from a quick summary to a detailed report. Consented WhatsApp groups of your own staff and volunteers can feed field reports into the same map, visible only to your organisation. Tailored analyses are a separate track on request.
This is our disaster response configuration, a ready starting point you can adjust to your preference.
- Real-time tag & event monitoring
- Event detection
- Reports, from summaries to detailed
- Confidence score
- Response-time guarantee
- WhatsApp group monitoring
- Data export / feed
- API access
What it tells you: locations and times, impact on people, logistics and infrastructure, public and critical facilities, response and repair actions, and relief and mitigation funding.
Supporting deployments through UNDAC
When the Dutch Disaster Team is deployed following a request through UNDAC, the UN Disaster Assessment and Coordination mechanism under UN OCHA, FloodTags supports it with a live, neighbourhood-level picture from social and news media. Since 2025, FloodTags has scanned social media, news and blogs in real time on a regular basis, producing flood-impact summaries used in the response. FloodTags has also served responders directly. For the Philippine Red Cross, it built a real-time flood monitor drawing on Tagalog-language media, to sharpen situational awareness and speed up response.