Barely five months after the birth of Twitter in 2006, company co-founder Biz Stone felt an earthquake, but his fiancé did not believe him then. However, within seconds, his phone was abuzz with an avalanche of twitter messages. His friends –– and many others –– were sharing their experience of the earthquake on the Twitter platform, validating his own experience.
Earthquakes set off panic everywhere, including on Twitter. Many users take to it to report earthquakes almost on a real-time basis, making it as the fastest reporting tool in such scenarios.
A Twitter blog of October 2007 quotes another blog by a Twitter user named Mike Doeff, who live-tracked Twitter messages about an earthquake in San Francisco Bay Area on October 30, 2007, and documented them on his blog.
Doeff, who tracked the words ‘quake’ and ‘earthquake’ on Twitter that day, confirmed the huge flow of information in another tweet. He posted the Twitter transcript on his personal blog. In fact, a local TV station, in its telecast, prominently displayed his blog link on the Twitter transcript.
Twitter’s use as a platform for coordinating relief operations during crises such as earthquake was highlighted during the Haiti earthquake in January 2010.
Luke Renner, founder of Fireside International (a non-profit media company), who experienced the January 12, 2010 earthquake in Haiti, explains the role of Twitter in such scenarios in one of his blog posts.
“In those first moments, the job was simply to find out what was going on, to place ourselves within the greater context of events, and get a grasp on what was at stake. Twitter proved to be the only way to do this quickly and comprehensively,” he said.
What Twitter did was to rapidly connect people from various walks of life: these were perfect strangers with incredibly diverse experience, capabilities, and resources, all of whom were actively pursuing meaningful relationships and networks outside of the ones they already had. And it was precisely those connections that gave birth to the kinds of exchanges that inevitably and repeatedly materialised into life-saving results (like bottles of water, food, medical attention, and other practical advances), he said.
Twitter played crucial roles during other major earthquakes in Japan and Nepal, where too they served as the first choice for coordination during the crises.
Rapid responseAlthough the National Earthquake Information Centre of the USGS (United States Geological Survey) processes about 2,000 real-time earthquake sensors (a majority of them in the US), the 2014 South Napa earthquake was detected by the USGS in 29 seconds using Twitter data. (Origin time was 2014-08-24 10:20:44 UTC; Twitter data detection time was 2014/08/24 10:21:13.)
A Twitter Data blog says the USGS monitors for earthquakes in many languages, and the words used can be a clue to the magnitude and location of the earthquake.
Referring to a USGS team that collaborated to look at how Twitter data could be used for earthquake detection and verification, it said people tweeting about actual earthquakes kept their tweets really short, even just to ask, ‘earthquake?’
Earthquakes may be centred in a particular location on the globe. But the 140-character world of Twitter universe feels it immediately, and responds with help too.