By Jason Miller
FederalNewsRadio
The U.S. Geological Survey is crowdsourcing natural disasters.
When an earthquake or flood occurs in the United States or even around the world, the agency is asking the public for feedback and mining the data from social media sites.
"[Thursday] morning's earthquake in Death Valley, Calif., was a magnitude five and within 3-or-4 minutes we had pushed information to our Web site," says Mike Blanpied, the associate coordinator of the USGS's earthquake hazards program. "Almost immediately we received responses from people who felt the earthquake. Anyone who feels it can fill out a short form and send the information back and we put it up on a map."
USGS launched the Did You Feel it? Web site in 2007 to gather information from around the world. On Thursday alone, people from around the world reported feeling 31 earthquakes from California to Washington State to Tonga to Indonesia.
"This has turned out to be a very positive and popular feature," Blanpied says. "For this Death Valley earthquake, more than 200 people responded from 88 different zip codes. We have a map up that shows in colors where people reported."
