The purpose of this paper is to examine floods in the city of Buenos Aires showing they constitute a case of progressive vulnerability that occur together with the socio-economic transformations that take place in the city and are strongly associated to urban empoverishment and environmental degradation processes. At the same time we shall argue about the role of the local government and the social organizations, and the role of the press in the definition of disaster as a social problem in the floods that occurred in the city during the last decade.