Among all natural hazards, earthquakes lead to the highest number of fatalities: after severe storms, these cause the second highest annual economic losses. From 2006 to 2015, Europe experienced 21 earthquake-related disasters that resulted in 1.049 fatalities, more than 18 billion Euros in economic losses, and affected 284.000 people. Due to such events and the severity of their consequences, risk awareness and perception of seismic threats have increased over the years among the public and decision makers in many European countries.

To reduce the seismic risk and the economic and life losses in Europe, the European community has been investing in research for years, stimulating collaborations among experts and institutions from different countries. In this way, not only do partner academic institutions share their knowledge and progress, but also mutual cooperation is strengthened both between the institutions themselves and states. In this framework, the four EU-funded projects, including TURNkey, CRISIS and REDACt, have decided to join forces in GeoSense cluster to provide tangible and shared solutions for seismic risk mitigation in European countries.

Rapid Earthquake Damage Assessment (REDA) platform developed by the Black Sea Basin project Rapid Earthquake Damage Assessment ConsorTium – REDACt (BSB966) aims at:

(i) supporting informed decisions regarding planning for both prevention and preparedness;

(ii) providing situational awareness during earth quake-imposed emergencies thus improving response capacity, decision making speed, and intervention efficiency; and

(iii) improving public response in line with state emergency plans to fully cover all areas, including cross border ones.

Specifically, the REDA platform will provide both scenarios based and near-real time earthquake damage, including earth quake triggered geotechnical failures (landslides, liquefactions, etc.). The REDA platform will be connected to major monitoring networks, including those of ITSAK/EPPO (Greece), NIEP (Romania), and AFAD (Turkey), and provide harmonized (unified) shake maps and damage states for any area within the implementation region (covering Greece, Turkey, Romania and Republic of Moldova). Additionally, improved ground motion parameter calculations are being made where necessary, using low-cost accelerometers installed in specific locations.

 Further a smartphone app is under development to provide guidelines and important information to the public during emergencies. The app will be made freely available (both Android and iOS versions) and will provide event information with user feedback capabilities as a form of crowdsourcing. Efforts are being made for the app to be able to provide on demand location information for user specified groups (i.e., family, friends, etc.). An educational Hub is also planned to help improve public emergency response by helping the public better understand the risks and to support them into developing their own emergency plans at various levels, always in line with state emergency plans. 

Read more about the GeoSense cluster here.