Motti ZOHAR, University of Haifa, Israel
Amos SALAMON, University of Haifa, Israel
Carmit RAPAPORT, University of Haifa, Israel
Damage descriptions of historical earthquakes are of great importance in assessing its source parameters. Commonly, these accounts are inverted into macroseismic intensity degrees, scaling the damage severity from none to complete destruction. However, the process encounters difficulties such as neutralizing the inherent bias of the original accounts and the inaccuracies involved with modern interpretation of ancient reports. The subjective judgment of expert's opinion and differences among the various intensity scales challenge the practice even more. Consequently, to date it is implemented mainly by skilled Geologists, Seismologists, and Engineers. Here we examine whether intensity evaluations made by Graduate students and by the crowd are equivalent to experts’ opinion, and thus can be engaged to the effort.
We conducted a survey that included eighteen historical damage reports of the 1927 M6.2 Jericho earthquake among Graduates (N = 44) who are familiar with Natural Hazards and are thus considered semi-experts. In parallel an online survey was distributed among a representative sample of Israeli citizens (N = 610). The outcomes were compared with experts' evaluations (the authors M.Z. and A.S.). It was found that the mean and mode intensity evaluations made by the respondents of both surveys are fairly similar. Furthermore, the evaluations were not significantly different among various social groups. The results demonstrate that evaluations conducted by semi-skilled or relatively large crowd may provide wisdom close enough to an expert’ opinion. Thus, engaging such groups may foster future damage assessment and enable a broader and effective research of historical earthquakes.
Mots clés : Historical earthquakes|Earthquake damage|Macroseismic scale|Crowd sourcing|Citizen science
A104276MZ