Laure Fallou

EMSC (Euro-Mediterranean Seismological Centre)

The spread of misinformation on social media can lead to inappropriate behaviors that can make disasters worse. In our study, we focused on tweets containing misinformation about earthquake predictions and analyzed their dynamics. To this end, we retrieved 82,129 tweets over a period of 2 years (March 2020–March 2022) and hand-labeled 4157 tweets....

Collecting data after an earthquake is essential to determine the phenomenon's impact on the population and built environment. To determine this impact, data must be collected on the number of injured or casualties among the population, buildings and infrastructure damaged. In 2018 The European Mediterranean Seismological Centre (EMSC) launched a m...

Presentation at the symposium: The November 26, 2019 Mw6.4 Durres, Albania Earthquake: Regional Seismicity, Regional Geodynamics and Seismic Hazard (ISDE-2023)

Social media such as Facebook or Twitter are at present considered part of the communication systems of many seismological institutes, including the European–Mediterranean Seismological Center (EMSC). Since 2012, the EMSC has been operating a hybrid Twitter system named @LastQuake comprising a bot for rapid information on global felt earthquakes an...

Social media such as Facebook or Twitter are at present considered part of the communication systems of many seismological institutes, including the European–Mediterranean Seismological Center (EMSC). Since 2012, the EMSC has been operating a hybrid Twitter system named @LastQuake comprising a bot for rapid information on global felt earthquakes an...

On January 12, 2010, Haiti was hit by one of the largest seismic disasters known to date. At the time, the culture and perception of seismic risk was low among the population and—because of the lack of seismic sensors in Haiti—so was seismological knowledge. In a citizen seismology approach, the S2RHAI project used low-cost seismic sensors (Raspber...

Misinformation spreads fast in times of crises, corroding public trust and causing further harm to already vulnerable communities. In earthquake seismology, the most common misinformation and misleading popular beliefs generally relate to earthquake prediction, earthquake genesis, and potential causal relations between climate, weather and earthqua...

Misinformation carries the potential for immense damage to public understanding of science and for evidence-based decision making at an individual and policy level. Our research explores the following questions within seismology: which claims can be considered misinformation, which are supported by a consensus, and which are still under scientific...

Previous research into social media in crisis communication has tended to focus on use by emergency managers rather than another key stakeholder, critical infrastructure (CI) operators. This chapter adds to this field by empirically investigating public expectations of information provided by CI operators during crisis situations. It does so by dra...

After an earthquake, it is necessary to understand its impact to provide relief and plan recovery. Social media (SM) and crowdsourcing platforms have recently become valuable tools for quickly collecting large amounts of first-hand data after a disaster. Earthquake-related studies propose using data mining and natural language processing (NLP) for...

After an earthquake, it is necessary to understand its impact to provide relief and plan recovery. Social media (SM) and crowdsourcing platforms have recently become valuable tools for quickly collecting large amounts of first-hand data after a disaster. Earthquake-related studies propose using data mining and natural language processing (NLP) for...

Public earthquake early warning (PEEW) systems are intended to reduce individual risk by warning people ahead of shaking and allowing them to take protective action. Yet very few studies have assessed their actual efficacy from a risk-reduction perspective. Moreover, according to these studies, a majority of people do not undertake safety actions w...

Public earthquake early warning systems have the potential to reduce individual risk by warning people of approaching tremors, but their development has been hampered by costly infrastructure. Furthermore, both users’ understanding of such a service and their reactions to actual warnings have been the topic of only a few surveys. The smartphone app...

Twitter has proved to be a powerful tool for the dissemination of scientific information in the aftermath of a seismic event. During an earthquake crisis, the affected population is in need of rapid, reliable information on what has just happened and what to do next to stay safe. However, it is not rare that reliable earthquake information takes a...

Public earthquake early warning systems have the potential to reduce individual risk by warning people of an incoming tremor, but their development is hampered by costly infrastructure. Furthermore, users' understanding of such a service and their reactions to warnings remains poorly studied. The Earthquake Network app turns users' smartphones into...

Previous research into social media in crisis communication has tended to focus on use by emergency managers rather than another key stakeholder, critical infrastructure (CI) operators. This chapter adds to this field by empirically investigating public expectations of information provided by CI operators during crisis situations. It does so by dra...

The problems of earthquake damage prevention and the effective seismic risk mitigation are critical issues that attract the interest of the seismological community and stakeholders globally. In particular, Rapid Seismic Risk Assessment (RSRA) methods gain increasing popularity and constitute the present state of the art regarding the earthquake thr...

Earthquake risk reduction approaches classically apply a top-down model where scientific information is processed to deliver risk mitigation measures and policies understandable by all, while shielding end-users from the initial, possibly complex, information. Alternative community-based models exist but are rarely applied at a large scale and rely...

The use of the LastQuake information system, its app, the associated Twitter account, and, to a lesser extent, the EMSC’s websites have been analyzed for the 7 days following the November 26, 2019, M6.4 Albania destructive earthquake to evaluate what can be improved and how crowdsourcing of information and monitoring of both use and absence of use...

Starting the 10th May 2018, a series of earthquakes has hit Mayotte, a French island in the Indian Ocean. Facing a lack of seismic data, scientific information and communication from the authorities, the inhabitants took advantage of social media to develop, on their own, a citizen seismology group, composed of more than 10,000 people. Due to a par...

Twitter is an established social media platform valued by scholars as an open way to disseminate scientific information and to publicly discuss research results. Scientific discussions on Twitter are viewed by the media, who can then pass on information to the wider public. Social media is used widely by geoscientists, but there is little documenta...

While maintaining a minimum level of service and rapidly restoring services to normal are key components of critical infrastructure (CI) resilience, who should and how to define these parameters remains under debate. Rarely solicited in the debate, yet integral actors in CI resilience, is the general public. In response to this, this paper presents...

Abstract. Twitter is an established social media platform valued by scholars as an open way to disseminate scientific information and to publicly discuss research results. Scientific discussions are widely viewed by the media who can then pass on information to the wider public. Here, we take the example of two 2018 earthquake-related events which...

This study investigates how citizens perceive the role of mobile phone apps specifically designed for disaster communication, and how these perceptions may differ from perceived roles and functions of social media in disaster‐related tasks/situations. Focusing on trust in authorities and technology use, results suggest that social media use not onl...

A network of “personal seismometers” is intended to complement Haiti’s national seismic network to engage and inform residents about earthquake hazards and preparation.

In a context of information overload, actors in disaster management are facing challenges to efficiently allocate critical information during a crisis. Based on the empirical experience of EMSC (Euro-Mediterranean Seismological Centre) with its application LastQuake, this paper explores ways to provide safety information in a timely manner, to the...

Previous research into the role of social media in crisis communication has tended to overlook how critical infrastructure (CI) operators might benefit from sites such as Facebook and Twitter, focusing instead on how emergency managers and the general public use such platforms. This paper sets out to address this gap by empirically exploring the ex...

Complex networks of high-tech sensors are tough to operate and maintain in developing countries – but new low-costs, low-maintenance instruments may help. Because they are “connected objects” they also provide new opportunities to engage the civil society in citizen-science. Here we describe a seismological instrumentation experiment in Haiti with...

Complex networks of high-tech sensors are tough to operate and maintain in developing countries – but new low-costs, low-maintenance instruments may help. Because they are “connected objects” they also provide new opportunities to engage the civil society in citizen-science. Here we describe a seismological instrumentation experiment in Haiti with...

Rapid identification of felt earthquakes is essential for determining public earthquake information. We present a new method to detect such earthquakes which hinges on the ubiquity of smartphones and the accurate geolocation that they offer. More precisely, the method is based on launches by its users of the LastQuake app-the European- Mediterranea...

Maintaining a minimum level of service and recovering quickly after a crisis event are key components of infrastructure resilience. While no consensus exists on the precise meaning of these two terms, one way to measure them is to examine public tolerances of service levels and recovery time. However, few studies have empirically investigated publi...

Crisis communication is a key component of an effective emergency response. Social media has evolved as a prominent crisis communication tool. This paper reports how social media was used by authorities, critical infrastructure operators and journalists during the terrorist attacks that hit Paris on 13th November 2015. A qualitative study was condu...

Crisis communication is a key component of an effective emergency response. Social media has evolved as a prominent crisis communication tool. This paper reports how social media was used by authorities, critical infrastructure operators and journalists during the terrorist attacks that hit Paris on 13th November 2015. A qualitative study was condu...

Maintaining a minimum level of service and recovering quickly after a shock are key components of critical infrastructure (CI) resilience. Nevertheless, recent literature indicates that there is an ‘expectation gap’ in relation to the services CI operators should provide to members of the public in the immediate aftermath of a disaster. However, fe...

This paper explores how critical infrastructure (CI) resilience can be improved through effective crisis communication between CI operators and members of the public. Drawing on academic and practice-based research into crisis and risk communication, as well as the results of 31 interviews conducted with key stakeholders from across Europe, the AES...

This paper explores how critical infrastructure (CI) resilience can be improved through effective crisis communication between CI operators and members of the public. Drawing on academic and practice-based research into crisis and risk communication, as well as the results of 31 interviews conducted with key stakeholders from across Europe, the AES...

The European Mediterranean Seismological Centre (EMSC), one of the top global earthquake information centers, has been empirically developing a multichannel rapid information system comprising websites, a Twitter quakebot, and a smartphone app for global earthquake eyewitnesses. At the intersection between seismology, citizen science, and digital c...

Twitter has emerged as a key platform for citizens during terrorist attacks, not only as a source of information but also as an outlet for providing support for victims. Citizen responses to such incidents on the microblogging site often demonstrate what Burgess (2008) refers to as ‘vernacular creativity’, with hashtags and memes used to express so...

Research on social media use in crisis communication usually focuses on use by either the public or emergency managers. Relatively few empirical studies have focused on another key player, critical infrastructure (CI) operators. This paper sets out to address this gap by examining Norwegian expectations of crisis communication from CI operators thr...

Previous research into social media crisis communication has tended to focus on use by emergency managers rather than other key stakeholder, critical infrastructure (CI) operators. This article adds to the field by empirically investigating public expectations of information provided by CI operators during crisis situations and if CI operators curr...

Previous research into the role of social media in crisis communication has tended to focus on how sites such as Twitter are used by emergency managers and the public rather than other key stakeholders, such as critical infrastructure (CI) operators. This paper sets out to address this gap by examining Barreiro residents’ expectations of disaster c...

Effective risk communication practices play a key role in building community resilience. This paper examines the role played by critical infrastructure (CI) operators in building community resilience by studying public expectations of disaster related information provided by CI operators during such crisis.

This report contributes to the IMPROVER project by providing information on the use of traditional and social media by relevant stakeholders to increase the resilience of critical infrastructures. It builds on the results of IMPROVER project D4.1 to explore the communication practices adopted by emergency managers and blue light organisations (e.g....

Previous research into the role of social media in crisis communication has tended to focus on how sites such as Twitter are used by emergency managers rather than other key stakeholders, such as critical infrastructure (CI) operators. This paper adds to this emergent field by empirically investigating public expectations of information provided by...

While the importance of transportation infrastructure in emergency management is recognized, the role of critical infrastructure (CI) operators has yet to be fully established, especially when it comes to providing aid to the public. This paper addresses this under-researched issue by drawing on key themes that emerged from a review of the literatu...