## 1 Introduction  
World Bank reports that the damages caused by the 2022 floods in Pakistan might exceed 14.9 billion USD, whereas total economic losses reach about 15.2 billion USD. Also, an approximate estimation of 16.3 billion USD is needed for reconstruction and rehabilitation, even though it does not include many basic needed assets [1, 2]. Alone, the transport and communication sector suffered significant damages of about 3.3 billion USD. The damages to the transport and communication sector further cause unimaginable damage to human life-saving activities, infrastructure, and emergency and rescue (ER) operations. Therefore, it is worthy to understand the sustainability and roles of information and communication technologies (ICTs) for the exchange of transport-associated information and communication flow (ICF) in the life cycle of a flood. There is no direct study that involves the measure of life and material losses due to lack of communication. The study of such losses is of a subjective type and requires attention and precise methods to estimate losses due to specific variables. Floods pose dynamic challenges to both evolving and evolved countries but how floods are responded to in order to minimize the damages that they can cause entirely depends on the disaster risk management policies, strategies, resources, and expertise that each individual country holds [3,4]. In recent years, the Yokohama framework following the Sendai framework of disaster risk reduction (2030) emphasized the inclusion of technology in coping with the deadly impacts of disasters, yet they considerably lacked technological details and action plans [5,6]. By keeping in view the variable capacities of different economies, the technology involvement definition varies too and is under-explored [7,8]. The role of ICTs in disasters has been under discussion recently, and there are many aspects that have not yet been thought about to engage ICTs in disasters [9]. ICTs in developing countries are under-adopted and the community requires training to engage ICTs effectively in various aspects of life [10]. As countries have different absorptive capacities toward ICTs [11], therefore, it is important to investigate the challenges faced by evolving and evolved economies regarding technological advancements and their subsequent applications. In recent years, transport systems [12], disasters [13], and technological [14] research domains have advanced and their applications too. This research has brought three of these major research domains together [14] and the overall system has become complex. Conventional discrete methods are insufficient to capture and address the real-time challenges caused within the frame of these three domains due to floods. Therefore, new methods are required to apprehend the integrated effect of floods on multiple systems and offer practical solutions to them. In addition, there exist insufficiently comprehensive methods to analyze the dynamics of a disaster [6]. Often, disasters and their impacts are studied either through quantitative [15,16] or qualitative [17,18] methods, which are often ineffective in grasping the flood systems' dynamics [19,20, 21, 22]. In recent years, big data [23], wireless sensors for alerts [24], ICT-based education programs [25], empirical methods [26,27], machine learning methods [28], and analytical methods [29] have been widely used. However, there exists a need for a comprehensive analysis method that captures the qualitative aspects of ICTs and disasters and interprets them in a quantitative manner. This is because humans are the first affected and the respondents to disasters who carry subjectiveness in the form of opinions, observations, and experiences [30]. [PERSON] [31,32] has developed a new approach named Q-Likert methodology, which is applied to disaster-affected evolving economies to understand the hurdles faced by experts in using ICTs. Q-Likert methodology holds the maximum possible evidence through quantitative measures of qualitative data approaches.