With May’s major flooding in Ratnapura, a city in Sri Lanka, and its disastrous consequences still fresh in our minds, it reminds me of a similar occurrence, this time in the city of Buenos Aires . The cosmopolitan capital of Argentina, too, is not a stranger to floods as it is built on nine streams. In 2013, a disastrous flood and endless rain caused over 50 casualties and thousands of evacuations.
The above two scenarios are pretty similar. However, perhaps locally we should be looking to and learning from what has gone before. Following the weather event, the local Buenos Aires government proactively embarked on a project to leverage big data and gain insights into rainfall and water levels during stormy seasons, leveraging on Oracle’s business intelligence capabilities.