Earthquake emergency response: how can the reports received help?

A new method uses online testimonies collected after earthquakes to classify events as high or low impact in the immediate aftermath of earthquakes. This approach may provide emergency responders with valuable information, improving their ability to respond appropriately.

By Sivan Yavas, science writer (@civan_yavas)

Citation: Yavas, C., 2023, Earthquake Emergency Response: How Sense Reports Can Help?, Temblor, http://doi.org/10.32858/temblor.313

In the year 2022, a 5.9-magnitude earthquake strikes a remote area of ​​Afghanistan, causing great destruction and killing more than 1,000 people. Although an early impact assessment of an earthquake can be straightforward when there is reliable data from a dense network of seismic stations, this was not the scenario the authorities were facing. Emergency responders underestimated the intensity and extent of the earthquake because the seismic network sparse in the area did not accurately reflect the level of ground shaking that occurred in remote locations. In addition, the high probability of landslides in these steep, mountainous regions exacerbated the hazards, which were not captured by hazard calculations based solely on data from seismological stations.

Knowing the extent of earthquake damage is key to earthquake response. Here, a woman gets medical attention after the June 2022 earthquake in Afghanistan that killed more than 1,000 people. Credit: Tasnim News Agency via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

A recent study published in The Seismic Record shows how self-reported testimonies of earthquake experience can be used to quickly classify events as high or low impact in the immediate aftermath, providing an important characterization of the earthquake that authorities can use to determine whether to take emergency action is important. The rating is based on the “felt reports” of residents, and is independent of seismographs. This approach can provide emergency responders with qualitative characteristics of earthquakes before more complex quantitative estimates of shaking intensity and extent are available. This information can improve the ability of emergency services to respond appropriately.

Citizen based seismology

While networks of seismic stations measure ground motion, “felt reports” use people’s observations to gather information about the extent, duration, and intensity of the shaking. Data is inexpensive and available quickly. The LastQuake service of the Euro-Mediterranean Seismological Center (EMSC) has collected more than 1.5 million global “felt reports” from more than 10,000 earthquakes between 2014 and 2021. With LastQuake, testimonies of earthquake witnesses are collected via the EMSC webpage or the LastQuake mobile app.

Although the reporting tool has been in use for 12 years, researchers have not adequately exploited the rich seismic data it produces, the authors of the new study point out.

says Henning Lillenkomp, a researcher at the University of Potsdam, who led the study. Lillenkamp and his colleagues focused on whether they could distinguish between high- and low-impact earthquakes because authorities responsible for emergency response rely on this distinction.

Researchers defined an earthquake as a significant impact if it caused at least one of the following: at least one building destroyed, at least 50 damaged, at least two fatalities, or documented financial losses. If none of the high impact conditions are met, the earthquake is classified as low impact.

The team used LastQuake’s reports to develop a database of high-impact and low-impact earthquakes. In total, their database contains 254 high-impact events and 1,994 low-impact events. In their analysis, the researchers saw a clear relationship between vibration area and impact, whereby feeling intense vibration over large areas tended to affect the most. The researchers then created a model that estimated the likelihood that future earthquakes would be high-impact based on reports from LastQuake users. To ensure the accuracy of these predictions, the researchers removed earthquakes with fewer than 50 reports from the database.

To test the effectiveness of the model, the researchers selected 11 validated earthquakes whose impact levels were already known. They used the concrete reports from these events to see if the model’s rating matched the actual impact level. In particular, the strength of the model lies in its ability to correctly identify a large number of low-impact events with high confidence, allowing emergency responders to tailor their response accordingly—to avoid using too few or too many resources, and to arrive with the support of an area that really needs it after an earthquake.

Distribution of high-impact and low-impact events from the Report Felts database, plotted by sham intensity (level of vibration experienced) and distance from the mean reporting location. The researchers found that the high- and low-impact events were generally different. Credit: Lillenkamp et al. (2023)

Inexpensive, fast and decisive alternative

Using citizen reports to estimate initial earthquake damage may be particularly important in remote areas, which tend to have no or scarce seismic monitoring networks or funds to improve existing stations.

“We were quickly realizing that this data might fill in the gaps, let’s say geographic gaps, where we don’t have expensive seismographs,” says Lillenkamp. While the authors’ method only uses felt reports to evaluate preliminary findings, there are other rapid impact assessment tools (eg, PAGER) that combine felt reports with recordings from seismic stations. However, these other methods rely on extensive and expensive seismographs to increase their accuracy, and may not be practical or available for all regions.

“This work is definitely a proof of concept of what can be done with community reporting,” says Danielle Somi, project manager at the EarthScope Consortium who was not the study’s author. Citizen Seismology takes advantage of the opportunity for everyone to report their own information. Although people are not the greatest seismometers, [information reported by the community] It gives us a lot of information about earthquakes and their intensity, especially in areas where the instruments are not that intense,” says Sumi.

The information in the felt reports is “a new type of data that hasn’t been used before. We don’t think of our work as replacing the latest technology,” says Lillenkomp. “Our idea is to have a quick alternative source of information.”

Sumi adds that the idea is to be able to bypass some of the things other methods have relied on, like using ShakeMap. This can have a significant impact in areas where we cannot obtain information for one reason or another.

Helicopter response after the 5.9-magnitude earthquake in Afghanistan, June 2022. Since there is no dense seismic network to estimate the level of ground shaking in underdeveloped mountainous areas that are also prone to landslides, the extent of the damage was not clear for many hours. For this event, LastQuake collected 50 reports in 8 minutes, which were required to run the researchers’ model for initial damage estimation. Credit: Tasnim News Agency via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

Collaboration is the key

Secondary hazards such as landslides or land settlement were not included in the study, but this could be a potential avenue for future research. Reports are not always well distributed about the affected area, which limits the potential of the method. However, “If we could put this into practice in some way to see if something like this would work in real time, I think that would be very valuable,” says Sumi.

Because the effects of earthquakes are highly variable from place to place due in part to differences in the built environment, creating a model that might predict the early effects of earthquakes in certain areas requires working closely with local disaster managers to identify and plan appropriate emergency responses.

“We can’t really make a recommendation on how to do this [the results of our study] It will be carried out practically without calling emergency responders,” says Lillenkamp.

Further reading

Lilienkamp, ​​H., Bossu, R., Cotton, F., Finazzi, F., Landès, M., Weatherill, G., & von Specht, S. (2023). Leverage crowd-sourced Felt Reports to distinguish high-impact from low-impact earthquakes globally within minutes of an event. The Seismic Record, 3(1), 29-36.

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