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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Diana Maria Contreras Mojica, Professor Sean Wilkinson, Professor Philip James
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
The 2020 Zagreb earthquake occurred on Sunday 22 March 2020. This earthquake was the first that happened during the lockdown imposed by governments to stop spreading the COVID-19. This fact makes the event interesting as a multi-hazard phenomenon. The lockdown made it not possible to deploy an earthquake reconnaissance mission. Therefore, it was necessary to undertake a remote mission supported by the monitoring and analysing social media (SM) platforms, such as Twitter and Instagram. This paper presents details and analysis of this monitoring and how it may help understand the impacts of an earthquake. In our work, we first identified the hashtags related to the event. Through the LastQuake app, we obtained the intensity reports from affected people and comments and pictures useful for damage assessment. The team obtained 59,246 tweets posted between the 20th March and the 30th April 2020 and 31,911 comments from LastQuake app users written on the day of the earthquake. Images from posts and comments were used for remote assessment of damage in buildings. Sentiment analysis (SA) was applied to tweets and comments related to the event to assess emergency management during the relief phase after the earthquake. Our work shows that only a limited number of pictures collected through social media were suitable for damage assessment of individual buildings. However, they were still useful as a proxy estimation of damages in some areas of Zagreb and surroundings. We also found SA supported by machine learning a valuable method to assess and identify critical aspects of the emergency and early recovery post-disaster phases. Applying SA we identified the most affected areas, the damages in the non-structural elements in hospitals, the support of collaborative networks for the evacuation of patients and the role of Ministers in the early recovery.
Author(s): Contreras D, Wilkinson S, Fallou L, Landès M, Tomljenovich I, Bossu R, Balan N, James P
Editor(s): Petra Gidak
Publication type: Conference Proceedings (inc. Abstract)
Publication status: Published
Conference Name: 1st Croatian Conference on Earthquake Engineering (1CroCEE) 2021
Year of Conference: 2021
Pages: 743 - 752
Print publication date: 22/03/2021
Online publication date: 22/03/2021
Acceptance date: 08/01/2021
Date deposited: 06/04/2021
URL: https://doi.org/10.5592/CO/1CroCEE.2021
DOI: 10.5592/CO/1CroCEE.2021
Library holdings: Search Newcastle University Library for this item
Series Editor(s): Stjepan Lakušić, Josip Atalić
Sponsor(s): Croatian Chamber of Civil Engineers; Samoborka d.d.; Spegra d.o.o.; Baumit d.o.o.; Mapei Croatia d.o.o.; MC-Building Chemicals d.o.o.; MAR d.o.o.; Rockwool Adriatic d.o.o.; Master Builders solutions; Cemex Hrvatska d.d.; Silka Croatia d.o.o.; Geobrugg AG; Mipem d.o.o.; Rofix Ltd. Croatia; Taus d.o.o.; Tarnick
ISBN: 9789538168475
