Learning from Earthquakes: Building Resilient Communities Through Earthquake Reconnaissance, Response and Recovery
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Cambridge
Department Name: Architecture
Abstract
Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.
People |
ORCID iD |
| Emily Kwok Mei So (Principal Investigator) |
Publications
Aktas Y
(2022)
Editorial: Disaster Reconnaissance Missions: Is a Hybrid Approach the Way Forward?
in Frontiers in Built Environment
Babic A
(2020)
Learning from Earthquake (UK) Mission to Zagreb
Baker H
(2022)
COVID-19 and science advice on the 'Grand Stage': the metadata and linguistic choices in a scientific advisory groups' meeting minutes.
in Humanities & social sciences communications
Baker H
(2022)
Information sharing practices during the COVID-19 pandemic: A case study about face masks
in PLOS ONE
Ioannou I
(2021)
Empirical fragility assessment of residential buildings using data from the Emilia 2012 sequence of earthquakes
in Bulletin of Earthquake Engineering
So E
(2022)
Data and its role in reducing the risk of disasters in the built environment.
in Natural hazards (Dordrecht, Netherlands)
So E
(2020)
The Zagreb Earthquake of 22 March 2020
| Description | Albania earthquake reconnaissance mission findings ? Pre-1990 URM buildings in solid silicate and clay bricks showed a good seismic performance. ? Pre-1990 prefabricated large-panel buildings performed very well in the earthquake ? Damage in RC buildings was observed mainly in mid- to high-rise (above 8 storeys) ? Approximately one third of the collapsed buildings were mixed-use RC MRF buildings built during the 1990s: ? Modern multi-storeys RC MRF multi-family residential buildings in Durres sustained severe non-structural damage. ? ineffective law enforcement in the construction process was a significant contributor to high seismic vulnerability Zagreb Remote Mission ? In terms of structural performance, the main building type affected was old unreinforced masonry structures with failures of gables, and out of plane failures evident in the City of Zagreb and the surrounding villages. ? For the conducting of remote missions: o It is feasible to undertake remote earthquake reconnaissance mission with the support of locals trained in the use of the EEFIT app; however the quality of the data is yet to be fully validated. o The EEFIT app and the SDI were effective for on-site and remote missions. Based on feedback from the mission improvements are ongoing o Non-specialized social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and Flickr provides text and image data useful for situation awareness. However, the lack of coordinates on Tweets and the kind of information extracted from the data make it challenging to use for earthquake reconnaissance. o Damage photos on Social media are mainly restricted to more important and accessible buildings Aegean Sea mission ? LastQuake app developed by the Euro-Mediterranean Seismological Centre (EMSC) collects text and image georeferenced data useful for earthquake reconnaissance ? To extract information from data collected from social media platforms such as Twitter and Instagram is necessary to use natural language processing (NLP). The usefulness and validity of this data is still to be confirmed. |
| Exploitation Route | The international earthquake engineering and reconnaissance communities will be interested in these outcomes and the potential tools being developed in this project to standardise data collection and storage. |
| Sectors | Communities and Social Services/Policy,Construction,Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software),Education,Environment,Other |
| Description | The grant has supported five post-earthquake missions since its inception and the field teams have posted regular public blogs online and disseminated their findings in presentations and reports. In most missions, whilst in the field, team members have visited local authorities, British consulates, local communities, and others to share their findings and knowledge, often beyond academia. The most recent reconnaissance mission to Turkey following the 6 Feb 2023 earthquake sequence, which is still ongoing at the time of writing, the EEFIT organisation, mission, and preliminary findings have attracted a lot of national and international media attention, and as a result, the importance of planning and earthquake resilient building designs is disseminating far and wide. |
| First Year Of Impact | 2023 |
| Sector | Construction,Education,Other |
| Impact Types | Cultural,Societal,Policy & public services |
| Title | EEFIT - Learning from Earthquake pilot questionnaire |
| Description | A pilot online questionnaire was designed and published by the team's RA Enrica Verrucci to elicit opinions from randomly selected EEFIT members on what is required from a spatial data infrastructure (SDI). The platform is intended to permit better management and sharing of the data collected by EEFIT. The survey asks the responders to evaluate how data is currently being acquired and used before, during and after field missions, and their views on how a framework of geographic data, metadata, and tools can be interactively connected and used to make future earthquake field missions more effective. |
| Type Of Material | Improvements to research infrastructure |
| Year Produced | 2018 |
| Provided To Others? | No |
| Impact | The emails explaining the project and the survey was sent out by Allan Brereton, the EEFIT Secretary/Treasurer and helped advertised the ambitions of the EPSRC-funded project to members of IStructE and EEFIT. The results of this survey will be directly used to develop the SDI, which is central to the project. |
| URL | http://opinio.ucl.ac.uk/s?s=53298 |
| Title | EEFIT spatial data infrastructure (SDI) prototype |
| Description | This spatial data infrastructure is being developed and tested with geospatial data collated from the recent mission to Sulawesi, Indonesia, following the devastating earthquake and tsunami on the 28th September 2018 (https://eefit-indonesia.com). The geospatial data at the very minimum will be a set of coordinates locating a photograph taken from the field. This could and will be complemented by building damage survey data and other survey results in the future. The final product, which is a main deliverable of the project will be used as part of a suite of materials produced by the Learning from Earthquakes project to support the reconaissance teams pre-, during and post-EFFIT missions. Important to note that the revised guidelines have legal implications for EEFIT (e.g., GDPR, data protection officer, data encryption), which is all being carefully reviewed. |
| Type Of Material | Data handling & control |
| Year Produced | 2018 |
| Provided To Others? | No |
| Impact | The SDI will become a standardised way of capturing field reconnaissance data following earthquakes. It will ensure that the data is centrally held by EEFIT post-mission, currently there are no central repositories for digital information collected on site. This will be an invaluable resource, and will help promote consistency in processing and using data by interested stakeholders. |
| Description | LfE Zagreb Earthquake Remote Reconnaissance Mission Field Damage Surveys |
| Organisation | University of Zagreb |
| Country | Croatia |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | University of Cambridge led the LfE team in conducting a remote reconnaissance mission after the March 2020 Zagreb earthquake. |
| Collaborator Contribution | Professor Josip Atalic and Professor Marta Šavor Novak from the Faculty of Civil Engineering supported master students Helena Majetic and Anamarija Babic in the planning, remote learning and implementation of damage surveys through the LfE damage app in the field from 18/05/2020 - 22/05/2020. |
| Impact | Online blog and report, and joint EEFIT and SECED presentation to an international online audience on the 27th January 2021. |
| Start Year | 2020 |
| Title | EEFIT Mobile app |
| Description | The EEFIT Mobile app uses an existing off-the-shelf platform called Device Magic and is built following the tier assessment rationale, which depends on the amount of time the user is allowed to spend on site. The data collected is commensurate to this time and gets hierarchically organised so that there is no repetition, whilst guaranteeing that an increasingly detailed level of information is gathered in each successive tier. |
| Type Of Technology | Webtool/Application |
| Year Produced | 2019 |
| Impact | The app has currently been tested during the following EEFIT Missions: the Albania Mission launched after the 26 November 2019 earthquake, the first-ever launched remote mission, after the March 2020 earthquake in Zagreb, Croatia, and the EEFIT Aegean Earthquake & Tsunami Mission. The EEFIT Mobile App Version 2.0 includes data capture relevant to earthquake damage and tsunami damage. The Mobile App liaises closely with the platform defined as spatial data infrastructure (SDI) for data managing and supports the automatic mapping of the data gathered on-site. |
| URL | https://research.ncl.ac.uk/learningfromearthquakes/outputs/theeefitmobileapp.html |
| Title | SDI |
| Description | An SDI is an infrastructure aimed at supporting the data management (including storage), discovery, access, and easy retrieval and reuse of the geographic data collected and can be designed to support very varied users' needs. Unlike storage devices, the use of metadata (i.e, data about the data) assists in the classification of the data and, in turn, promotes the integration of data coming from disparate sources and thus limiting - if not eliminating - the need for parallel and costly data collection campaigns. The EEFIT Spatial Data Infrastructure is designed with a user's needs-centred approach to accommodate data collected in reconnaissance and recovery missions as well as training. Since missions can occur without internet connectivity, the SDI is designed to work on two complementary systems. The offline local SDI is hosted on a laptop computer which is carried during mission times. It is used to upload all the data that are collected during the mission, so that "no data is left behind" and that perishable information about the data are collated into a centralised place at the time of collection. Once uploaded the data are analysed by ad-hoc scripts so that key metadata can be extracted automatically. For the uploaded photos, the typical metadata include the time of capture, the resolution, information about the collecting device, and geolocation. The metadata and the data volunteered by the data collector at the time of upload are used to build a database of information linked to the collected data and to map the data that have geolocation. The local SDI is supported and augmented by a cloud-based SDI, which enriches the information available in the local SDI by adding a further layer of data richness. This is achieved by integrating the data collected with the EEFIT app and other apps that EEFIT may use to collect data. The EEFIT app de facto replaces the need for paper forms, which were used in the past. The integration of the SDI and the EEFIT app allows the user to collect disaster data at ease and to be guided in this process by the workflows that have been designed in the EEFIT app forms so that the data collected are standardised and can be easily compared. Once uploaded, the "data to maps" process is performed automatically by the SDI. The SDI has 3 components: an Uploader - which consists of a set of easy forms that can be accessed both offline and online to upload data to either the local SDI or the Cloud-based SDI, a Metadata Extractor which analysed the data and populates a database, and a Mapper that uses the data in the database to produce daily maps of what has been observed in the field. When there is no internet connectivity, the users will be able to see the locations that have been visited during daily deployments in the form of a trail of dots. Each of the dots represents the place where the geolocated data have been collected (e.g. geolocated picture of damaged building). If internet connectivity is present, the user will be able to download the data collected with the EEFIT app by accessing the app dashboard online. Once these data are also uploaded, new data attributes will be linked to the collected data. |
| Type Of Technology | Webtool/Application |
| Year Produced | 2019 |
| Impact | The EEFIT SDI aims to: - Build institutional memory via collected data - Support multi-disciplinary data analysis and research - making the data more easily accessible to all - Prove the impact of EEFIT Missions in research - Streamline the data management process by using automatic and ad-hoc script that convert the uploaded data into web map |
| URL | https://research.ncl.ac.uk/learningfromearthquakes/outputs/SDI.jpg |
| Description | APP/SDI training |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | 8 people trained in the use of EEFIT app and their connection with the SDI to undertake the building damage survey after the earthquakes in Zagreb and the Aegean region in 2020. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2020 |
| URL | https://research.ncl.ac.uk/learningfromearthquakes/outputs/theeefitmobileapp.html |
| Description | BBC interview |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A press release, press conference or response to a media enquiry/interview |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Media (as a channel to the public) |
| Results and Impact | BBC Science Editor, Rebecca Morelle and crew conducted a interview with Emily So and Tugce Tetik, a PhD student and part of the EEFIT Kahramanmaras Team. This recorded segment will form part of a BBC feature on the Turkey/ Syria earthquake. The BBC crew will also be filming work of the deployed field mission team from 13-17th March 2022 in Turkey. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
| URL | https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-64920236 |
| Description | Blog for the EEFIT Mission to the 6 FEB 2023 Kahramanmaras Earthquake Sequence |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Engagement focused website, blog or social media channel |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | A blog site was set up for the EEFIT Kahramanmaras Mission to Turkey, which will run between the 1st of March 2023, the start of the remote mission, to the end of the field reconnaissance mission on the 17th of March 2023. The blog is run by our whole team, divided into subgroups of interest and expertise and contains booth technical and non-technical content to cater for wide range of audiences. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
| URL | https://eefitkahramanmarash.wordpress.com/ |
| Description | Blog for the Zagreb (Croatia) EEFIT Mission |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Engagement focused website, blog or social media channel |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | The blog documented the first ever remote earthquake mission conducted by EEFIT under the auspices of the Learning From Earthquakes Project. All participants were from the Research Team on the project, from across UCL, Newcastle University and Cambridge University. The Blog created greater interest in earthquake mission activities,and created a wide interest in remote earthquake reconnaissance missions, paving the way for the remote earthquake mission conducted after the 2020 Aegean earthquake and tsunami. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2020 |
| URL | https://lfemissiontozagreb.wordpress.com/ |
| Description | EEFIT - SECED UK evening talk: Remote earthquake reconnaissance feasibility study: Zagreb earthquake of March 2020 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | The evening presentation was a joint EEFIT and SECED lecture which was delivered on 27 January 2021 with the aim of presenting the data collection and repository tools being developed in LfE and the findings of our remote reconnaissance exercise on the Zagreb earthquake in March 2020. A total of 150 people attended the event, and the presentation was followed by a discussion on the current situation in Croatia following the Zagreb and the December 2020 Petrinja earthquake, and the feasibility of hybrid reconnaissance activities in the future. The lecture can be viewed at https://www.ice.org.uk/eventarchive/the-zagreb-earthquake-of-march-2020-webinar. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
| URL | https://www.ice.org.uk/eventarchive/the-zagreb-earthquake-of-march-2020-webinar |
| Description | EEFIT Mission Training session |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | The half day workshop was organised jointly by EEFIT and the LFE project team to provide basic training for Team Leaders and Team Members to operate in post disaster field environments; to provide guidance on considerations for organising missions including roles and responsibilities; to provide guidance on Health and Safety procedures and related requirements before, during and after missions; to provide guidance on data collection in the field (where this particular grant fit in); and to provide guidance on expected EEFIT outputs including reporting formats and timelines for output delivery. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2020 |
| URL | https://research.ncl.ac.uk/learningfromearthquakes/newsevents/eefitmissiontrainingsession.html |
| Description | ICE Lecture on EEFIT mission: 2020 Zagreb, Croatia, Earthquake |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | This lecture summarised the work of the EEFIT mission to the Zagreb, Croatia earthquake. The earthquake reconnaissance was conducted remotely, due to COVID restrictions. The presentation demonstrated the tools and methods used to conduct the remote mission with discussion of their advantages and disadvantages. The lecture was delivered to engineers and general public, through online means, and was hosted by the Institution of Civil Engineers. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
| URL | https://www.ice.org.uk/eventarchive/the-zagreb-earthquake-of-march-2020-webinar |
| Description | IStructE Lecture on EEFIT mission: 2020 Aegean earthquake and tsunami |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | This lecture summarised the work of the EEFIT mission to the Aegean earthquake. The seismic event, which hit the Turkish and Greek coastline on 30 October 2020, also caused a tsunami. The mission brought together field and remote mission strategies. It explored ways to maximise efficacy in data collection to capture the event characteristics and response due to both hazards. The lecture was deliverd to engineers and general public, through online means, and was hosted by the Institution of Structural Engineers. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2020 |
| URL | https://www.istructe.org/resources/case-study/2020-eefit-aegean-earthquake-mission/ |
| Description | Podcast focusing on how science advice, data and evidence are used by decision makers in government |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A broadcast e.g. TV/radio/film/podcast (other than news/press) |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Dr Rob Doubleday, Director of University of Cambridge's Centre for Science and Policy discusses how SAGE and modelling advice were used during the Nepal Earthquake in April 2015. He's joined by James Jackson, an Earthquake Geologist and Professor in Earth Sciences at the University of Cambridge, and Professor Emily So, an Architectural Engineer and Director of the Cambridge University Centre for Risk in the Built Environment (CURBE). Both James and Emily work on earthquakes, what causes them and what damage they do. Their collective expertise have stemmed from years of fieldwork funded by NERC and EPSRC, providing avenues for instrumenting and monitoring seismic activity, collection of empirical data pre and post earthquakes and local networking opportunities. All of these have been essential for advancing knowledge and in providing advice to governments and aid agencies during emergencies. The intention of the podcast is to highlight how science advice, data and evidence are used by decision makers in government. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| URL | https://www.csap.cam.ac.uk/Research-Policy-Engagement/science-and-policy-podcast/science-advice-and-... |
| Description | Training in damage assessment App and SDI preceding 2020 Aegean earthquake and tsunami remote mission |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | This was a training session delivered to Msc and PhD students of the Middle East Technical University (Turkey), where they were trained to use the earthquake and tsunami building damage assessment App and SDI uploader. The students used the App to collect information on building damage on the ground in Samos (Greece) and Izmir (Turkey) and uploaded the information to the project SDI (database of digital information). We could not deploy due to COVID restrictions, and hence conducted the reconnaissance mission remotely through training local students in the use of our tools. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2020 |
| Description | Training in damage assessment App and SDI preceding Croatian earthquake remote mission |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | This was a training session delivered to Msc students of the University of Zagreb, where they were trained to use the earthquake building damage assessment App and SDI uploader. The students used the App to collect information on bulding damage on the ground in Zagreb and uploaded the information to the project SDI (database of digital information). We could not deploy due to COVID restrictions, and hence conducted the reconnaissance mission remotely through training local students in the use of our tools. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2020 |
| Description | Zagreb remote mission 2020 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | 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. 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. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2020 |
| URL | https://research.ncl.ac.uk/learningfromearthquakes/newsevents/remotemissionforearthquakeincroatia.ht... |