News of the 5.5 earthquake that hit the Ontario-Quebec border broke on Twitter. The snapshot from Trendsmap, taken shortly after the quake, highlights the stream of messages.
People were tweeting about what had happened and searching for more information about the scale of the tremor.
Within minutes, there were dozens of reports of a quake from across the eastern seaboard on Twitter, providing an idea of how widely it was felt.
And all this was taking place before the media or the US Geological Survey had any information on what had happened.
The volume of tweets about the earthquake are related to the timing and location of the event. The quake happened in the middle of the work day on the east coast – 1:41 p.m. Many people would have been in offices, likely at a computer and online at the time.
Additionally the quake was felt in major urban centres, from Montreal to Ottawa, as well as in east coast cities in the US. The Trendsmap of the #earthquake hashtag suggests the largest number of tweets were coming out of Toronto.
Like I suspect many others, I turned to Twitter when the Toronto building I was working in started to sway, searching for an explanation.
The incident highlights once more the journalistic value of a real-time, distributed and collaborative platform such as Twitter.
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