Australia's Flood Emergency: How can we stay Publicly Updated about this Crisis?

Since La Niña is coming back again this summer in Australia, media content mentioning floods in NSW has been rising sharply since October.

Using our partner’s platform Sprinklr, we discovered that currently 77K mentions have been made of which 35% (28.32K) arrive straight from the news. However, most of the mentions come from Twitter (39K) which has been the centre of debate during this crisis situation.

Overall, the conversation concerning the floods is considered neutral counting 51.68K mentions. However, negative mentions are still increasing every day; with a total of almost 23K for the month of October. On the other hand, with only 2.49K mentions - positive content was the least communicated sentiment on this topic.

Thanks to Sprinklr, we investigated the global conversation and found the trending topics over a specific period of time. In this case, we found out the themes most discussed are the SES, the Community & Personal Damage, and the New South Wales Government. On the other hand, the most used sentences and words are the following:

•  The Warragamba dam wall.

• The street of Lismore conditions after floods.

• Last Wednesday and Thursday were the heaviest rain in NSW.

• The rivers across Australia's populous states.

• The numerous warnings.

• Several emergency areas.

In fact, when we analysed the social media posts and articles citing the Australian floods, there was content from both official sources (news, ministers, etc) and the public; mostly responding to the government's actions.

Going through those, we learned that the citizens were anxious about the numerous warnings and the different emergency areas declared by the government. Then, when the heaviest rain hit them on Wednesday and Thursday last week, the NSW Premier announced that he would fund the Warragamba dam wall improvement to make it taller, while a plan of constructing hundreds of houses in the floods plan was considered.

As expected, there were various debates gathered mostly on Twitter implicating the government’s choices. Finally, as the concerned areas are now slowly recovering from the floods, the conversation gave way to the many impacted infrastructures, numerous damages, endangered animals, and unfortunate injuries identified.

To go further, when we looked at the emotions felt by the public, we learned that an anger sentiment was the most significant towards almost all the government support organisations. Correspondingly, the topics regarding NSW Police concentrate a considerable anger sentiment.

Finally, the current conversation is slowly transforming from the NSW and Victorian floods towards the audience being worried about Sydney possibly turning into an emergency area in the near future.

Online conversation monitoring can empower organisations to understand publicly accessible unstructured data and take action across communications, strategy and service design.