La Habla earthquake and the role of social media in the information transmission

On Friday, March 28, a magnitude 5.1 earthquake hit the area of LA, 1 mile east of La Habra at a depth of 4.6 miles according to USGS, with more than 100 aftershocks been recorded since. The earthquake seems to have originated from Puente Hills thrust fault, which caused the 1987 Whittier Narrows earthquake and stretches from the San Gabriel Valley to downtown Los Angeles. What is interesting about the particular event is not the damage it caused, which is for the most part considered minor, but its fast-spreading coverage in social media which made seismologists and emergency personnel pay attention.

Posts on Facebook of fallen objects and broken plates, tweets from visitors about the closure of the Disneyland rides are only a small sample of the power of social media in the transimission of information after an emergency event such as an earthquake. This real-time reporting procedure provided the Brea police with information about the rockslide on Carbon Canyon Road causing a car overturn. But all this bulk of information being posted should be handled with caution and the challenge for experts is to be able to properly classify it so that they can take immediate and effective action. The pioneering Did You Feel It? system, launched by USGS, has played a major role in the mapping of the received information on where the quakes were felt the most. Only after Friday's event it received over 16,000 reports, providing the scientists with valuable data about the intensity and the distance at which the shaking was felt. But according to USC social media professor Karen North "Places like Caltech and the USGS need to get on Twitter, so that when the torrent of tweets go out talking about this earthquake's implications for future earthquakes, they can go into that communication channel and correct false information and lead people to facts". Web and social media chief for the USGS, Scott Horvath, agreed that there is an expectation for instant feedback on what happened.