A system and method for identification and handling of a flood of alarms in a telecommunications system. A flood event occurs when a plurality of alarms in a queue of an alarm management system exceeds a threshold. The threshold may be a static, dynamic or adaptive threshold. A classification is determined for each flood event and preventive measures are determined. A plurality of floods having identical or different classifications may be identified respective of the plurality of alarms. A classification may be related, for example, to a network element (NE), element manager (EM), sync event, user actions, external application or rules. Preventive measures may be, for example, resetting a NE or EM or diverting alarms from the queue into another memory portion. The threshold may be determined respective of the total number of alarms in queue, the rate of alarms received and the rate of processing the alarms.