Social media, public scholarship, and injury prevention

Twitter as a Potential Disaster Risk Reduction Tool. Part II: Descriptive Analysis of Identified Twitter Activity during the 2013 Hattiesburg F4 Tornado

BACKGROUND

This article describes a novel triangulation methodological approach for identifying twitter activity of regional active twitter users during the 2013 Hattiesburg EF-4 Tornado.

METHODOLOGY

A data extraction and geographically centered filtration approach was utilized to generate Twitter data for 48 hrs pre- and post-Tornado. The data was further validated using six sigma approach utilizing GPS data.

RESULTS

The regional analysis revealed a total of 81,441 tweets, 10,646 Twitter users, 27,309 retweets and 2637 tweets with GPS coordinates.

CONCLUSIONS

Twitter tweet activity increased 5 fold during the response to the Hattiesburg Tornado.  Retweeting activity increased 2.2 fold. Tweets with a hashtag increased 1.4 fold. Twitter was an effective disaster risk reduction tool for the Hattiesburg EF-4 Tornado 2013.