Disasters and emergency response

After two deaths to flooding in as many rainy seasons and another close call on Monday, villagers from Khva Village in Phnom Penh’s Dangkor District are demanding action. They say that the cause of the flooding is the extraction of soil nearby by a company ...

Farmers hit by drought in Battambang this year are already benefitting from a new crop insurance product for rice farmers introduced by Forte Insurance, with at least 60 families in two districts of the country’s main rice-growing province collecting payments so far. ...

Fishing communities along two of Cambodia’s principle rivers say their livelihoods are threatened by droughts that have reduced water levels and devastated fish numbers.“The Tonle Sap is 3 metres lower than last year,” Long Sochhet, president of the Coalition of Cambodian Fishing Communities, said yesterday. ...

Cambodia has sustained far fewer deaths due to natural disasters than any other country in the region this year, deputy secretary general of the National Committee for Disaster Management Ross Sovann said on Friday, at a workshop coinciding with Asean Day of Disaster Management. ...

This year’s celebration of ASEAN Day for Disaster Management (ADDM) and International Day for Disaster Reduction (IDDR) will be hosted by Cambodia on Oct. 9-10, aiming to raise people’s awareness of disaster risk reduction. ...

Two years since the government passed a law on fire safety – and hot on the heels of a recent spate of fires at local garment factories, neighbourhoods and nightclubs – a recent informal survey has found that even high-end hotels still widely lack required ...

Relief efforts continued this week in the wake of tropical storm Vamco, which rolled into Cambodia from Vietnam, bringing torrential rain, strong winds and flooding last week. ...

Officials in Kampot province are working to quell rumors that flooding there was intentionally caused by the opening of a hydropower dam upstream. ...

A girl has died and thousand hectares of agricultural plantation have been flooded by flashflood in two separate districts in Battambang province, said Keo Vy, spokesman for the government’s National Committee for Disaster Management said today.   ...

Hundreds of families were evacuated from their homes in Pailin province over the weekend as tropical storm Vamco brought torrential rain to the country’s northwest after causing serious flooding in Kampot and Battambang provinces last week, officials said Sunday. ...

Rainstorms have battered coastal areas and the Kingdom’s northwest, leaving hundreds of homes flooded and thousands of hectares of crops underwater, a disaster management official said yesterday.Battambang province was the worst hit, with at least one death reported and some roads blocked by floodwaters, according ...

Six districts in Battambang province are dealing with heavy flooding, and 155 households in Bavel district were evacuated this weekend, officials said. ...

Floodwater in the region around the Kampot city and Toek Chhou district has been receding today, according to Kampot provincial authorities. ...

Residents of Kampot province continued to feel the devastating effects yesterday of widespread flooding in the area caused by the opening of the Kamchay Hydropower Dam, which has left thousands temporarily homeless and crippled local businesses.Keo Vy, spokesman of the National Committee for Disaster Management ...

More than 3,600 families and 1,500 hectares of farmland have been affected by flooding in ten communes, in Kampot province. ...

Local government officials in a southern Cambodian province failed to evacuate villagers in time to prevent their homes and rice fields from flooding after the operators of a Chinese-built hydropower dam informed them a day earlier that they would open the facility’s gates to release ...

People are no longer denying that El Nino – a cyclical weather phenomenon that can cause severe drought – has arrived in Cambodia. ...

Rice crops in western Cambodia will die from drought if the region does not receive rain within the next month, officials said Thursday, as a development organization urged the government to do more to assist farmers with irrigation. ...

The Asian Disaster Preparedness Center, USAID and a range of participating organizations have launched a five-year initiative they hope will transform the way in which the government, organizations, universities and citizens use data for research and decision-making. ...

Pa Socheatvong, the Phnom Penh governor and head of the Phnom Penh branch of the Cambodian Red Cross (CRC), oversaw the opening of a luxury six-story hotel in Preah Vihear City on Monday, officials said. ...

Amid what some meteorologists have dubbed a “Godzilla-like El Niño”, drought conditions during Cambodia’s scheduled monsoon season have significantly worsened from what last year were termed historically bad levels, a new report from the Ministry of Agriculture shows. ...

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) today launched “SERVIR-Mekong,” for 5 countries in the Lower Mekong, according to U.S Embassy’s press release received here this afternoon. ...

Persisting dry conditions have affected rice seedling in about 185,451 hectares of paddy rice in Cambodia, Khmer Times quoted a report by the Agriculture Minister. ...

A rash of fires ripped through the capital on Monday evening and yesterday, with the most devastating one destroying 36 houses across a packed slum next to the Monivong bridge in the southern district of Chbar Ampov.The Chbar Ampov fire began to burn at about ...