COMMUNICATING EARTHQUAKE HAZARDS THROUGH GIS-BASED STORY MAPPING

While South Carolina is not generally known for its earthquakes, it does experience between 2 and 5 felt earthquakes a year. These earthquakes tend to be between magnitude 2.0 and 4.5 on the Richter scale and cause little damage, over 70 earthquakes of this size were recorded in SC between 1973 and the present. In fact the State of South Carolina was the site of the largest eastern US earthquake ever recorded. The Charleston Earthquake of 1886 has been estimated to have had a magnitude between a 6.9 and 7.3. Studies of the Summerville Middleton Seismic zone show that this zone has events of this magnitude with a recurrence of approximately 500 years. Yet smaller 5.0 to 6.0 events are thought to occur every 100 to 200 hundred years.

With this in mind the Students at the College of Charleston, along with the South Carolina Emergency Management Division, and South Carolina’s Earthquake Education and Preparedness program have teamed together to create a GIS-Based Story Map application that will be used as a primer for Public and K-12 education in the state. The story map is a user friendly GIS driven web-based multimedia application that is used to convey hazards research and education to a wide audience. It provides information to be used as the basic science primer in the classroom or home school environment while performing important outreach activities to a wide audience.