# Social Media for Emergency Rescue: An Analysis of Rescue Requests on Twitter during Hurricane Harvey

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.07187 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.07187/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 13 Nov 2021.

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Location reference recognition from texts: A survey and comparison](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.01683/) (2022)
- [Infrastructure Ombudsman: Mining Future Failure Concerns from Structural Disaster Response](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13528/) (2024)
- [RAPID: A Reproducible Multi-Agent Pipeline for Interpretable Disaster Damage Assessment from Satellite and Street-View Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.21819/) (2026)
- [Can We Predict the Unpredictable? Leveraging DisasterNet-LLM for Multimodal Disaster Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23462/) (2025)
- [CrisisFake: Benchmark Validity of AI-Generated Text Detection for Disaster Social Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.35821/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Social media plays increasingly significant roles in disaster response, but effectively leveraging social media for rescue is challenging. This study analyzed rescue requests on Twitter during the 2017 Hurricane Harvey, in which many residents resorted to social media to call for help. The objectives include (1) understanding the characteristics of rescue-request messages; (2) revealing the spatial-temporal patterns of rescue requests; (3) determining the social-geographical conditions of communities needing rescue; and (4) identifying the challenges of using social media for rescue and propose improvement strategies. About half of rescue requests either did not provide sufficient information or neglected to include rescue-related hashtags or accounts. Of the 824 geocoded unique rescue requests, 41% were from FEMA-defined minimal flood risk zones. Communities sending more rescue requests on Twitter were environmentally and socioeconomically more vulnerable. Finally, we derived a framework summarizing the steps and strategies needed to improve social media use for rescue operations.