Image from @USGSted/twitpic

Yesterday, there was an earthquake and instead of Stopping, Dropping, and Covering as I had done many times during earthquake drills in elementary and middle and probably even high school, I just stopped… and then I checked the USGS website for the report. And when I got on Facebook and Twitter, I was not surprised that the reports were also coming in from my social networks.

There were 296 tweets per minute about this.

I had filled out USGS’ “Did You Feel It?” surveys for other earthquakes before, and at that point it occurred to me that the tweets could help provide this type of information and sure enough, USGS is already ON IT with their Twitter Earthquake Detector (TED) project. People all over the world tweet about earthquakes:

Image from @USGSted/twitpic

Even the news was reporting based on tweets from people who felt the earthquake. (I sure hope Twitter is not the new Wikipedia, though.)

Since I grew up around this area, the earthquake was not a surprise to me, but my colleagues have mentioned how their peers were taken by surprise when they experienced their first earthquake in the area as college students. I wondered what the freshmen experience was like from yesterday’s earthquake and I’m sure their social media networks provided some answers. I also wondered what the 1989 or the 1906 earthquake aftermath would have been like in this day and age of social media.

As for the earthquake yesterday… I was around for October 1989 and this one was a light tap.

Image from earthquake.usgs.gov

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