BCI Global Awards 2025 Winner Spotlight: Dubai Municipality
The BCI is pleased to give the Most Effective Recovery award of 2025 to Dubai Municipality. This award is designed to recognise organisations that have faced major disruption and demonstrated exceptional resilience in their return to operations.
On April 16th 2024, Dubai faced its most extreme rainfall event in 75 years, receiving over 142 mm of rain in 24 hours, which exceeded the annual average in a single day. Triggered by a rare regional storm, this deluge caused widespread flash flooding, disrupting transportation, infrastructure, and public services.
Sewage systems were disrupted, with five pumping stations inundated. Cemetery and abattoir services were also affected. Some facilities faced power loss and water ingress, with a temporary outage at a data centre that affected reporting.
However, by activating its Rain Emergency Response Plan following early warnings, shifting to remote work and deploying flood mitigation assets, Dubai Municipality restored essential city services within 72 hours, mobilising over 2,400 staff. It employed advanced smart systems like leveraged AI forecasting and dashboards for real-time decision-making to provide uninterrupted delivery of critical services.
Subsequently, Dubai Municipality incorporated lessons into system upgrades to strengthen future resilience.
The judges found that Dubai Municipality had a detailed and comprehensive recovery response to the extreme rainfall incident and that it had a significant impact on their urgent services. Their recovery and continuity strategies, resilience planning and lessons learnt processes were aligned with the BCI’s Good Practice Guidelines.
They said, ‘Dubai Municipality's response to the critical incident validated their business continuity planning and embedded systematic improvements to build future readiness.’
Submissions for the BCI Regional Awards 2026 close 16 April, we strongly encourage all applicants to submit their applications well in advance of the deadline in order for us to review and feedback, if needed.
Join us for BCI World Hybrid 2026 at the Convene Sancroft, St. Paul's, London, on 10-11 November 2026! Register your interest now to secure a super early bird discount for both in-person and virtual attendance.
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