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" Were you watching Twitter as it lit up all and down the East Coast? Can Twitter be useful for data collection? Christopher Emrich of The Hazards and Vulnerability Research Institute at the University of South Carolina: We have looked at social media and Twitter and things for collecting dataa few issues that go along with that. The great thing about Twitter [is that] a majority of time you have a geospatial location attached to that tweet. You know where that cellphone was. If you get enough of them, [you] could create a panoramic view of this event through data. If you think of 360 degrees around a point, if you had one tweet from every degree, you could create this immensely useful panoramic view of the situation. The issue is trust: Do you trust info coming across? Another issue is retweeting... we have to tease [that] out of it.  Emergency managers are using Twitter to gain information currently. But it&amp;#039;s really hard to put out a good evacuation message in 140 characters. How often do major earthquakes happen on the East Coast? Emrich: That&amp;#039;s hard to say. Geologic time is different than what we consider time. There was a large one in Charleston 1886. We have a major fault in the Tennessee areathe New Madrid fault. I think that, of course, the West Coast is much more active. But when we have earthquake events here, they cause the same sort of damage. The 1886 magnitude earthquake in Charleston was a magnitude 6.67.3 on Richter scale.  No, we don&amp;#039;t have them frequently, but the risk is still there. What&amp;#039;s problematic [is that people] on the East Coast are relatively unaware of the threat. Anecdotally, I just spoke to someone from Florida who was in Virginia, and no one knew what to do during this earthquake. What are the biggest earthquake preparation challenges for New York and other East Coast cities that rarely see earthquakes? Jerome Hajjar, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Northeastern University in Boston and 2010 PM Breakthrough Award winner for an earthquake-resilient building structure: I think there&amp;#039;s really two sets of challenges. One is in these locations where we sense that the occurrence interval on large earthquakes can be quite longthen there&amp;#039;s really a public policy issue of costbenefit ratio for newer construction [regarding how earthquake-resistant to make it]. Then, for existing construction, some of that can be very vulnerable. Even the West Coast: Their older buildings have lightly reinforced concrete and masonry structuresthese are potentially very vulnerable. New York certainly falls in that category in many different aspects of this infrastructure.   If you want an example, look at what happened in Loma Prieta in 1989 [the San Francisco Bay quake], where they had a lightly reinforced elevated roadway that collapsed. That doesn&amp;#039;t necessarily mean all of our infrastructure is that vulnerable, but it provides an example that the East Coast should be aware of. The Loma Prieta earthquake was not that big either. Would you say that New York is due (or overdue) for a big quake? Mark Zoback of the Department of Geophysics at Stanford University: Nope. Really? It&amp;#039;s something people bandy about a lot, and something we&amp;#039;re particularly worried aboutpartly because it&amp;#039;s PM&amp;#039;s home base. Well you shouldn&amp;#039;t be. The fact is that significant earthquakes can occur almost anywhere. It&amp;#039;s really inappropriate to put emphasis on a given place and say it&amp;#039;s overdue, because you could say that almost about anywhere, and I think it causes unnecessary alarm. Not even as a &amp;quot;what if?&amp;quot; Well, what if a meteorite could hit? Or, the Earth could get swallowed up by a black hole. But seriously, there are real earthquake hazards and it would be inappropriate to put too much emphasis on a given place. Just because it&amp;#039;s hypothetically possible doesn&amp;#039;t mean it&amp;#039;s something that should be widely discussed and a source of alarm for the public. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/a6965/top-4-quotes-about-the-east-coast-quake-6316880/>