🌍 GDACS Disaster Alerts Scraper

Export live disaster alerts from GDACS as flat rows: hazard type, alert level, country, coordinates, measured severity, the dates the event ran, and a link to the official report. Filter by hazard type and by minimum alert level. No API key, no account, no login.

GDACS is the Global Disaster Alert and Coordination System, run jointly by the European Commission and the United Nations. It scores earthquakes, cyclones, floods, volcanoes, wildfires and droughts on a green, orange and red scale as they happen. The public view is a map and a feed, neither of which can be filtered into a table or joined against a list of your own sites. This Actor returns each active event as 25 fields, with latitude and longitude on every row.

Who uses it	What they use the alerts for
🏭 Buyers of businesses with physical sites	Checking whether a target's plants, warehouses or stores sit where floods and cyclones keep landing
📑 Insurance and risk analysts	Building an event history by hazard type and alert level, with coordinates to map against exposure
🚚 Supply chain and operations teams	Seeing which countries a supplier depends on are under an active orange or red alert
📰 Newsrooms and NGOs	Watching every hazard type in one feed, with the official GDACS report one link away

📋 What it does

💡 Why it matters: a site visit tells you the roof is new. It does not tell you the plant sits in a flood plain that GDACS has flagged four times. Coordinates on every row make that a join, not an argument.

• 🎚 Filters by alert level. alertLevel returns events at or above Green, Orange or Red, or all of them.
• 🌪 Filters by hazard type. EQ earthquake, TC tropical cyclone, FL flood, VO volcano, WF wildfire, DR drought, in any combination.
• 📍 Puts coordinates on every row, so events map directly against a list of addresses.
• 📏 Keeps the measured severity and its unit, for example a tropical depression at 64.8 with severityUnit of km/h, alongside the plain text version.
• 🗓 Records the event window: when it started, when it ends or ended, when GDACS last modified it, and whether it is still current.
• 📦 One row per event episode, the same 25 fields every run, exportable as CSV, Excel, JSON or XML.

📊 Output

Every alert is one flat row. null means GDACS publishes no value for that field on that event, which is common for country on an ocean cyclone.

Field	Type	Description
🖼 imageUrl	string	GDACS map icon for the hazard type and alert colour
📛 eventName	string	Event name, for example Flood in United States or a cyclone's designation
🔤 eventType	string	Hazard code: EQ, TC, FL, VO, WF or DR
🌪 eventTypeName	string	Hazard in words, for example Tropical Cyclone
🚦 alertLevel	string	Green, Orange or Red
🔢 alertScore	number	GDACS numeric alert score behind that colour
🆔 eventId	integer	GDACS event id
🧩 episodeId	integer	Episode number within the event, since long events are updated in episodes
🏳 country	string	Country GDACS names for the event, null where it names none
🔠 iso3	string	ISO 3166 three letter country code
📍 latitude	number	Event latitude
📍 longitude	number	Event longitude
📏 severity	number	Measured severity value, meaning depends on hazard type
📝 severityText	string	Severity in words, for example Tropical Depression (maximum wind speed of 65 km/h)
📐 severityUnit	string	Unit for severity, for example km/h, empty where the hazard has none
🟢 fromDate	string	Start of the event window
🔴 toDate	string	End of the event window
🔄 dateModified	string	When GDACS last updated the record
✅ isCurrent	boolean	Whether the event is still current
📄 description	string	GDACS one line description
🛰 source	string	Monitoring source behind the alert, for example GLOFAS or NOAA
🌐 affectedCountries	array	Countries listed as affected, empty where none are
🔗 reportUrl	string	Link to the full GDACS report for that event and episode
🕒 scrapedAt	string	ISO timestamp of collection
⚠️ error	string	null on a normal row

Example rows

{
  "imageUrl": "https://www.gdacs.org/images/gdacs_icons/maps/Green/FL.png",
  "eventName": "Flood in United States",
  "eventType": "FL",
  "eventTypeName": "Flood",
  "alertLevel": "Green",
  "alertScore": 1,
  "eventId": 1103888,
  "episodeId": 91,
  "country": "United States",
  "iso3": "USA",
  "latitude": 41.119,
  "longitude": -73.3711,
  "severity": 0,
  "severityText": "Magnitude 0 ",
  "severityUnit": "",
  "fromDate": "2026-05-19T01:00:00",
  "toDate": "2026-09-15T01:00:00",
  "dateModified": "2026-09-14T10:27:56",
  "isCurrent": true,
  "description": "Flood in United States",
  "source": "GLOFAS",
  "affectedCountries": [
    "United States"
  ],
  "reportUrl": "https://www.gdacs.org/report.aspx?eventid=1103888&episodeid=91&eventtype=FL",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-09-14T16:35:20.552Z",
  "error": null
}

{
  "imageUrl": "https://www.gdacs.org/images/gdacs_icons/maps/Green/TC.png",
  "eventName": "FIFTEEN-E-26",
  "eventType": "TC",
  "eventTypeName": "Tropical Cyclone",
  "alertLevel": "Green",
  "alertScore": 1,
  "eventId": 1001321,
  "episodeId": 4,
  "country": null,
  "iso3": null,
  "latitude": 16.3,
  "longitude": -119.7,
  "severity": 64.8144,
  "severityText": "Tropical Depression (maximum wind speed of 65 km/h)",
  "severityUnit": "km/h",
  "fromDate": "2026-09-13T21:00:00",
  "toDate": "2026-09-14T15:00:00",
  "dateModified": "2026-09-14T14:45:48",
  "isCurrent": true,
  "description": "Tropical Cyclone FIFTEEN-E-26",
  "source": "NOAA",
  "affectedCountries": [],
  "reportUrl": "https://www.gdacs.org/report.aspx?eventid=1001321&episodeid=4&eventtype=TC",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-09-14T16:35:20.671Z",
  "error": null
}

✨ Why choose this Actor

	What you get
An official source	GDACS is operated by the European Commission and the United Nations, not by an aggregator reposting headlines.
Coordinates on every row	Latitude and longitude come with each event, so a list of sites becomes a distance calculation.
Two filters that compose	Hazard type and minimum alert level apply together, so a run can ask only for orange and red cyclones.
No credentials	The GDACS feed is public. No API key, no account, no login.
You pay per row	No subscription. A filter that matches nothing costs nothing.

🚀 How to use it

1. Create a free Apify account. New accounts start with $5 of credit.
2. Open the Actor and select Try for free.
3. Pick the hazard types you care about in eventTypes, or leave it empty for all of them.
4. Set alertLevel and maxItems.
5. Select Start, then export from the Dataset tab as CSV, Excel, JSON or XML.

A first run:

{
  "maxItems": 10,
  "alertLevel": "Any"
}

Serious weather events only:

{
  "eventTypes": ["TC", "FL"],
  "alertLevel": "Orange",
  "maxItems": 500
}

Earthquakes at every level:

{
  "eventTypes": ["EQ"],
  "alertLevel": "Any",
  "maxItems": 1000
}

⚙️ Input

Field	Required	Description
eventTypes	No	Hazard types to include: EQ earthquake, TC tropical cyclone, FL flood, VO volcano, WF wildfire, DR drought. Empty returns every type
alertLevel	No	Minimum alert level: Any, Green, Orange or Red. Green is the lowest severity, Red the highest
maxItems	No	Maximum alerts to collect in a run. Free plans are capped at 10 as a preview, paid plans go to 1,000,000

💰 Pricing

Pay per result. No subscription, and no Apify platform usage on top.

Apify plan	Free	Bronze	Silver	Gold	Platinum	Diamond
Per alert row	$0.0085	$0.00817	$0.00783	$0.0075	$0.0075	$0.0075

Rows collected	Cost on the Free plan
100	$0.85
1,000	$8.50
10,000	$85.00

Free plan runs return up to 10 rows as a preview. Any paid Apify plan lifts that to 1,000,000 per run.

🔌 Integrate with any app

The dataset is available through the Apify API as soon as the run finishes. Use run-sync-get-dataset-items for a one-shot call, webhooks to trigger what happens next, or the Make, Zapier, Airbyte and LangChain integrations listed on the Actor page. A scheduled run plus a webhook is enough to post new orange and red alerts into a channel.

🤖 Use with an AI agent

Give an agent live access to the alert feed over the Model Context Protocol:

$claude mcp add --transport http apify "https://mcp.apify.com?tools=acquistion-automation/gdacs-disaster-alerts-scraper"

Then ask it in plain language which events are active in a country and read the rows back.

❓ Frequently asked questions

Why is severity zero on a flood row? Severity is hazard specific. GDACS reports a magnitude for earthquakes and a wind speed for cyclones, but for some flood records it publishes no numeric value and the row comes back as 0 with an empty severityUnit. Read severityText and alertScore on those rows.

What is the difference between eventId and episodeId? An event that runs for weeks is updated in episodes. eventId identifies the event, episodeId identifies which update this row is. The pair is what reportUrl points at.

Why is country empty on some events? Cyclones and earthquakes out at sea are not assigned to a country. The coordinates are still there, and affectedCountries fills once GDACS attributes the event to land.

Does this return historical disasters? It returns what the GDACS feed is publishing, which is the current event set. Schedule the Actor and append the runs if you want a history of your own.

How often does the data change? GDACS updates continuously as monitoring sources report. dateModified tells you when each record was last touched, and isCurrent tells you whether it is still live.

What can I export? CSV, Excel, JSON and XML from the run page, or JSON straight from the API.

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About Acquisition Automation Co.

We build automation for people buying businesses. The repetitive part of an acquisition search, checking listings, pulling public records, tracking owners and assets, is work a machine should do, so the buyer's time goes into judging deals instead of collecting them.

We add new Actors regularly. If there is a source you need and do not see here, tell us.

🆘 Support

Open an issue in the Issues tab of this Actor with your run ID, the input you used, and what you expected to get back.

⚠️ Disclaimer

This Actor is independent and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by GDACS, the European Commission or the United Nations. It collects only publicly available data, and it is not a substitute for an official emergency warning. You are responsible for using that data in compliance with the source's terms of service and applicable law.