Laos — Natural Disaster Report
Asia · Live status: High (1 active event)
Current situation: 1 natural disaster event is currently monitored in Laos, with a worst severity of Severe. Details, sources and timestamps are listed below.
Laos is landlocked and mountainous, and its hazards follow the monsoon. Heavy seasonal rain produces flash floods and landslides in the northern highlands and flooding along the Mekong in the lowlands. Hydropower development has expanded rapidly, and the 2018 collapse of a saddle dam at the Xe-Pian Xe-Namnoy project caused severe downstream flooding, drawing attention to dam safety as a compound hazard. Tropical storm remnants crossing from Vietnam bring the heaviest rainfall events. Drought affects agricultural output in years when the monsoon underperforms.
Live map — Laos
Loading live data… · Marker positions are approximate; severity is labelled in each popup. Sources: USGS, GDACS, NASA EONET, NOAA/NWS, EMSC.
Active alerts & recent events
Latest earthquakes
Near a particular city? Earthquake history near a place · disasters reported near a place · compare Laos's earthquake record with another country.
Risk profile
Monsoon flooding and landslides June-October. Tropical storm remnants July-September. Drought during weak monsoon years. Dry-season burning affects air quality March-April.
Disaster displacement in Laos
3,429 internal displacements
Largest single event: 2,082 from storm, beginning 31 August 2024.
A displacement is a movement, not a person: somebody forced from home more than once in a year is counted more than once. These are movements caused by disasters only — displacement caused by conflict is counted separately and is not included here.
Source: Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), Global Internal Displacement Database. IDMC publishes annually, so the latest year here is the latest they have finalised — not the current one.
River flood forecast — Laos
No chance of exceeding even its 2-year flood flow in this forecast.
GloFAS alert level: Inactive · Peak expected: as currently ongoing · forecast of 19 Oct 2026
No chance of exceeding even its 2-year flood flow in this forecast.
GloFAS alert level: Inactive · Peak expected: as currently ongoing · forecast of 19 Oct 2026
GloFAS forecasts are computer model output, published for information only. They are not a flood warning: only national and regional authorities issue flood warnings for their own area. A reporting point is a place on the model's river network, which may sit a few kilometres from the town it is named after. All 259 rivers →
What this site sees in Laos
| Source | Events here, last 12 months | What it will not tell you |
|---|---|---|
| European-Mediterranean Seismological Centre | 1 | Global for earthquakes, with the best coverage in Europe and the Mediterranean. It publishes nothing about any other hazard. |
| ReliefWeb (UN OCHA) | 1 | Global, but it reports on humanitarian RESPONSE. It arrives days after an event rather than during it, and never functions as a warning. |
| GDACS (European Commission / United Nations) | none | Global, but deliberately selective: it alerts on disasters likely to need INTERNATIONAL response. Serious local flooding that a national agency handles alone will not appear here. |
| US Geological Survey | none | Global for earthquakes above roughly M4.5, and denser where there are more seismometers. It publishes nothing about any other hazard. |
| NASA FIRMS | none | Global, but it sees only what the satellite saw on its pass, and thick cloud hides fire. A quiet day here is not evidence that nothing burned. |
| NASA EONET | none | Global and curated rather than automatic, so it is slower than the raw feeds and carries far fewer events. |
| WMO Alert Hub (national weather services) | none | Each warning comes from one country own alerting authority, so the scale is that agency scale and is not comparable between countries. Many agencies publish no coordinates, and those warnings are placed at the centre of the country rather than where the weather is - the area name is the real answer. |
| MeteoAlarm (EUMETNET) | none | Europe only. It publishes no coordinates at all, so every warning here is placed at the centre of its country and the area name is the only reliable indication of where it applies. |
| NOAA Tsunami Warning Centers | none | These two centres warn for the US and Canadian coasts and for the Pacific and Caribbean basins. The Indian Ocean and Mediterranean have their own warning centres, which are not read here. Their routine information statements - the ones that say there is NO tsunami danger - are deliberately not imported, so an empty tsunami list means no threat was issued, not that nothing was checked. |
| NOAA National Hurricane Center | none | The Atlantic and the eastern and central Pacific only. No typhoon in the western Pacific and no cyclone in the Indian Ocean or the southern hemisphere appears here; those come from GDACS and from national services. |
Not applicable here: US National Weather Service — Covers the United States only. It publishes nothing about any other country, so its absence from a country page is not an outage. ; USGS Volcano Hazards Program — United States volcanoes only - Alaska, Hawaii, the Cascades, Yellowstone, California and the Northern Mariana Islands. It says nothing about Indonesia, Iceland, Italy or anywhere else, so its silence about a foreign eruption is not a judgement about that eruption.
Frequently asked questions
What natural disasters are currently active in Laos?
There are currently 1 monitored natural disaster events in Laos. The overall risk status is High. See the live list on this page for details and sources.
What natural hazards does Laos face?
Laos is landlocked and mountainous, and its hazards follow the monsoon. Heavy seasonal rain produces flash floods and landslides in the northern highlands and flooding along the Mekong in the lowlands.
When is the main natural disaster season in Laos?
Monsoon flooding and landslides June-October. Tropical storm remnants July-September. Drought during weak monsoon years. Dry-season burning affects air quality March-April. Seasons shift from year to year; treat these as the usual pattern, not a forecast.
Where does this disaster data for Laos come from?
Data is aggregated from official sources including USGS, GDACS (EC/UN), NASA EONET, ReliefWeb and national agencies. Every event links to its original source, and update times are shown on each record.
Data sources: USGS, GDACS (EC/UN), NASA EONET, NOAA/NWS, EMSC, ReliefWeb (UN OCHA). See data sources & attribution and methodology. This page does not replace official emergency guidance.