Open data

What the world does not publish

Natural hazards are well served. Scientific agencies monitor them continuously and publish machine-readable output, because their own responders need it.

Most human-scale incidents have nothing. No agency anywhere on Earth publishes a live feed of building collapses, bus crashes, factory fires, gas explosions, drownings or stampedes. Not in any country. Those events reach any dataset — ours included — only because a journalist wrote them up.

Of the 38 incident types we classify, 22 have no official real-time feed anywhere in the world. That is the table below, and it is the single most useful thing we can tell you about our own data.

Download as CSV   CC BY 4.0 — cite Global Incident Tracker with a link

What "official real-time feed" means here

A deliberately strict test: a public agency publishes these events, in real time, in a machine-readable form, as a matter of routine. It does not mean somebody eventually publishes a report — most countries produce road-death statistics once a year, and an aviation authority may take a year to publish a finding. It also does not mean we cover that type well. It only means the feed exists.

Type by type

Incident type	Live official feed?	Where our records come from
Air Crash	None anywhere	GDELT · national press · Wikipedia Investigation bodies publish months later, not in real time.
Avalanche	Yes	Meteoalarm · GDACS · news European warning services are good; most mountain ranges have nothing.
Bridge Collapse	None anywhere	GDELT · our harvester · national press
Building Collapse	None anywhere	GDELT · our harvester · national press · Wikipedia · public reports
Chemical Spill	None anywhere	GDELT · national press
Cold Wave	Yes	US NWS · Meteoalarm · national services (CAP) · news
Conflict	None anywhere	GDELT · national press · Wikipedia Academic datasets (ACLED, UCDP) exist but are licensed and not real-time.
Cyber Attack	None anywhere	GDELT · national press
Cyclone / Hurricane	Yes	GDACS · NOAA NHC · US NWS · Meteoalarm · national services (CAP) · NASA EONET NHC covers the Atlantic and eastern/central Pacific by name and intensity.
Drought	Yes	GDACS · NASA EONET · ReliefWeb · news Slow-onset, so a start date is a judgement rather than an observation.
Drowning	None anywhere	GDELT · our harvester · national press Almost entirely invisible. Most drownings are never reported anywhere.
Earthquake	Yes	USGS · EMSC · BMKG · GeoNet · INGV · GDACS The most complete real-time detection network humanity operates for anything.
Epidemic	Yes	WHO · WHO Africa · European CDC · news Official bulletins lag the outbreak, sometimes by weeks.
Explosion	None anywhere	GDELT · our harvester · national press
Famine / Food Crisis	Yes	GDACS · ReliefWeb · news Declaration is a political act as much as a measurement.
Fire	None anywhere	GDELT · our harvester · national press · FIRMS (large outdoor only) Satellites see hectares, not houses. Structure fires are news-only.
Flood	Yes	GDACS · NASA EONET · US NWS · Meteoalarm · national services (CAP) · news Official for large events; small local flooding arrives only through news.
Gas Leak	None anywhere	GDELT · our harvester · national press
Heat Wave	Yes	US NWS · Meteoalarm · national services (CAP) · news Warnings exist; heat DEATHS are counted months later, if at all.
Industrial Accident	None anywhere	GDELT · our harvester · national press Confined-space deaths are badly under-captured: single fatalities rarely make the news.
Landslide	Yes	GDACS · Meteoalarm · national services (CAP) · news Large slides reach official feeds. The single-house slide never does.
Maritime Accident	None anywhere	GDELT · our harvester · national press
Mine Accident	None anywhere	GDELT · national press
Nuclear / Radiological	None anywhere	GDELT · national press The IAEA publishes, but not as a routine machine-readable live feed.
Power Outage	None anywhere	GDELT · national press Utilities publish local outage maps; nothing aggregates them globally.
Rail Accident	None anywhere	GDELT · our harvester · national press Derailments get reported; people struck on the line, which is the larger toll, do not.
Riot / Unrest	None anywhere	GDELT · national press
Road Accident	None anywhere	GDELT · our harvester · national press The largest killer we track and the one with no live feed at all. National statistics appear yearly.
Shooting	None anywhere	GDELT · national press
Stampede / Crowd Crush	None anywhere	GDELT · our harvester · national press
Storm	Yes	GDACS · US NWS · Meteoalarm · national services (CAP) · NASA EONET
Terror Attack	None anywhere	GDELT · national press · Wikipedia
Tornado	Yes	US NWS · Meteoalarm Strong for the United States, thin almost everywhere else.
Tsunami	Yes	NOAA / PTWC · GDACS Mostly warnings and advisories rather than confirmed damaging waves.
Volcanic Eruption	Yes	Smithsonian GVP · GDACS · NASA EONET Smithsonian reports weekly, so timing is coarser than seismic feeds.
Wildfire	Yes	NASA FIRMS · NASA EONET · GDACS · Meteoalarm Satellite thermal detection. Sees large outdoor fires; cannot see a kitchen.
Space Weather	Yes	NOAA SWPC
Other Incident	None anywhere	GDELT · national press · public reports

Why this matters if you use any incident data

Because news is the only route for those 22 types, coverage follows media attention rather than danger. An incident in a country with a dense local press is far more likely to be recorded than the identical incident somewhere with little reporting. We reduce that by reading in local languages across many countries; we cannot eliminate it.

The practical consequence: do not build a country league table out of this data, or out of anyone else's. For the news-only types you would mostly be ranking newsroom density. Comparing a country against its own history is the comparison the data supports.

The full method, including how we merge duplicate reports and what our severity rating does and does not mean, is in how we track every incident on Earth and on the about page. The archive itself is on the data page under CC BY 4.0.

Corrections welcome

If you know of an official real-time feed for any type marked "None anywhere", please tell us and we will add it and credit you. Being wrong in public about this is the one thing that would make the page worthless: contact us.