Japan Geoscience Union Meeting 2022

Presentation information

[J] Poster

H (Human Geosciences ) » H-CG Complex & General

[H-CG27] Human social activities and earth and planetary sciences

Wed. Jun 1, 2022 11:00 AM - 1:00 PM Online Poster Zoom Room (19) (Ch.19)

convener:Kazuo Amano(Center for Spatial Information Science, The University of Tokyo ), convener:Takashi Oguchi(Center for Spatial Information Science, The University of Tokyo), Kayoko Yamamoto(University of Elctro-Communications), convener:DAICHI KOHMOTO(Nara University of Education), Chairperson:Kazuo Amano(Center for Spatial Information Science, The University of Tokyo)

11:00 AM - 1:00 PM

[HCG27-P03] Utilization of Social Media at the Times of Heavy Rain Disaster in Southern Kyushu

*Kayoko Yamamoto1 (1.The University of Electro-Communications)

Keywords:Heavy Rain Disaster, Social Media, Twitter

The cloud computing society where everyone can access the Internet using various information tools has been already developed all over the world, and it is the times of IoT (Internet of Things) and IoE (Internet of Everything) when various things were connected to the Internet. Under such a circumstance, social media such as Twitter, Facebook and You Tube are widespreading as familiar information and communication tools in the world. Additionally, as later mentioned in sections 2 and 3, social media in addition to geographic information systems (GIS) are actively utilized as powerful digital infrastructures at the times of disasters, and they are included into the systems as the measures for disaster prevention and reduction.
On the other hand, in recent years, because the occurrence frequency of meteorological disasters such as typhoon, local heavy rain and heavy snow in addition to earthquake and volcanic eruption tremendously increased, it is the most important issue to adopt the effective measures for disaster prevention and reduction around the world. Additionally, as later mentioned in section 3, the digital infrastructures are toughened in the above measures, and the importance of information and communication technology (ICT) and internet environment is widely recognized especially in recent Japan. Because, in Japan, torrential rains during the rainy season and typhoons in summer and autumn caused other issues including flood, landslides and slope failure in particular. As a result, agricultural products would be seriously damaged, and precious lives and property would be lost at worst.
Yamamoto (2020) described the utilization of ICT as a digital infrastructure concerning disaster countermeasures at the time of the heavy-rain disaster in western Japan in 2018, demonstrated the usefulness of social media and GIS as tools to effectively provide important information before, during and after the times of disasters, and presented the potential utilization and issues of Twitter as a familiar digital infrastructure. Based on the results of Yamamoto (2020), the present study aims to describe the utilization and issues of social media at the time of the heavy-rain disaster in southern Kyusyu in 2020.
At the time of torrential rain in southern Kyusyu in 2020, social media is utilized powerful tools to submit and gather the information related to the disaster by the general public in addition to the central local governments. However, it is not possible for local governments to utilize social media for many reasons such as human resources and information literacy of the staffs. However, during Typhoon Hagibis in October 2019, Nagano Prefectural Government used their official Twitter account for disaster prevention information as a tool to gather rescue request information, and encouraged users that need be rescued to submit tweets with images, location information, and the hashtag “#TyphoonHagibisDamageinNagano” resulting in 50 cases of tweets leading to successful rescues. Additionally, Koshigaya City, Saitama Prefecture created the operation standard of the use of hashtag included into tweets. Thus, it is an important issue to make use of the information in social media for rescue in the real space. Based on the real cases during disasters, it is desirable that each local government should promote the setting of rules for utilizing Twitter in particular, according to the local situations beforehand.