University of Colorado Boulder (CU-Boulder) researchers found that tweets sent during last year's massive flooding on Colorado's Front Range were able to detail the scope of damage to the area's infrastructure. The researchers say the discovery could help geotechnical and structural engineers more effectively direct their reconnaissance efforts after future natural disasters and provide them data that might otherwise be lost due to rapid cleanup efforts. "People were tweeting amazing pictures and videos of damage to bridges and other infrastructure systems," says CU-Boulder professor Shideh Dashti. "After the fact, we compared those tweets to the damage reported by engineering reconnaissance teams and they were well correlated." The researchers used Twitter data collected by the Empowering the Public with Information in Crisis (EPIC) Project, a program launched in 2009 to study social media use during disasters. To read further, please visit http://www.colorado.edu/news/releases/2014/09/03/tweets-during-2013-colorado-floods-gave-engineers-valuable-data.