How can new technologies help us with earthquake reconnaissance?

Earthquake reconnaissance missions have been very successful in identifying the specific causes of failure for individual buildings and the deficiencies in building codes or local construction practices that have led to these; however, their ability to capture robust statistics on patterns of failure is usually beyond their scope. Furthermore, the success of these endeavours in establishing poor construction designs and practices, means that if we are to continue to learn new lessons we will need to gain fresh insights using new data streams. Recent technological advances have the ability to enable us to both increase the amount of data collected and to improve on the precision of these measurements. Furthermore, social media has the potential to provide entirely new data streams and to significantly add value to collected data by harnessing an army of data manipulators and interpreters. Howto do this in a reliable way however, is the subject of much debate. In this paper, we explore the potential for a number of trialled and potential technologies to collect better and new information in earthquake reconnaissance, including virtual damage surveying - where results from damage surveys completed in the field, are compared to omnidirectional images collected during the mission and interpreted by a virtual surveyor based in the UK, data collected through aerial images taken by UAVs and 3D models created from a series of drone or other images. Finally, we describe the potential of social media such as Twitter to collect data streams on damage and other impacts. Examples of impact data such as road closures, landslips and infrastructure service failures collected for flooding and landslide will be presented to show the potential of this technology for earthquakes