Hello,

I'm having difficulty turning this into a proper question, but here goes...

Some of you may have heard about the flooding happening in Queensland, Australia. Well, I'm in the inner suburbs of Brisbane right now; the river has been slowly creeping toward my house since Tuesday. When I left for work this morning it was twenty meters down the road when it is normally kilometers away.

Within hours of the distater striking, the government already had some pretty good web applications available for people to get information about what was happening and where the flood was predicted to rise. They also set up a database for people to search for the whereabouts of relatives or could register their location for others to see.

Has anyone been involved in the development of these kinds of projects before? It's interesting that they could churn out this software in what appeared to be less than a day when the average development house could take weeks at best. In what ways did it differ from a 'normal' project? Any other thoughts?