Rapid Assessment of Disaster Impacts on Highways Using Social Media

Abstract

A timely and reliable assessment of disaster impacts on highways is desired for executing evacuations, providing emergency services, and planning relief and recovery activities in disaster management. Although social media—a near-real-time and human-centered information source—has been increasingly investigated to assess disaster impacts on communities, the employment of social media for assessing disaster impacts on highways is still less explored due to the lack of a systematic and reliable approach. To fill this gap, this research presents a social media–based approach to assess disaster impacts on highways. Two social media–based indicators, namely, the number of impact-related tweets (NIT) and the geolocation of impact-related tweets (GIT), are designed to indicate the severity and location of disaster impacts on highways, respectively. Disaster impacts on highways during Hurricane Harvey in Houston were studied to demonstrate the developed approach. The feasibility and applicability of the research outcomes are validated through the highway high-water incidents data collected by the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT).