Post Earthquake Disaster Awareness to Emergency Task Force using Crowdsourced Data

Nowadays, reports of disasters are disseminated through social media before they reach the concerned authorities. Despite the timely volume of reports pertaining to natural calamities, the disaster management forces generally face an uphill task in ascertaining the ground-level situation for rescue and relief operations. Motivated by these findings the proposed work, notifies the post-phase situational awareness of an earthquake hit area to the rescue task force. In this work, social media users are analogous to a human sensor network in the crowdsourced initiative. To ensure the credibility of the crowdsourced information, GIS (Global Information System) annotated description are considered for clustering. Then the cluster centers denoting latitude and longitude of the calamity area are visualized via Maptive tool notified via SMS (Short Messaging Service) to the rescue task force from an area outside the disaster. Such crowdsourced description of incidents enables the rescue task force to evacuate people at the incident site and also in nearby locations before the next shockwave or another crisis situation occurs. Experimentation has been carried out to determine the time taken to notify via SMS.