When a major earthquake strikes, the engineering community mobilises quickly. Within hours, data begins flowing - seismic recordings, satellite imagery, social media posts from affected areas. Within days, reconnaissance teams are being assembled. But between the immediacy of the disaster and the eventual publication of a rigorous technical report - which may take a year or more - there is a gap. Who is telling the engineering story as it unfolds, in terms that are technically credible but publicly accessible? For EEFIT missions, the answer has increasingly been: the mission blog.
This piece reflects on two missions, separated by three years and very different in scale, in which the blog played a central but differently-shaped role: the 2020 Aegean Earthquake and Tsunami Mission, and the 2023 Mission to the Kahramanmaraş Earthquake Sequence. Together, they illustrate that a mission blog is far more than a public relations exercise. At its best, it is a real-time integration tool, a form of institutional recognition, and an honest document of what engineers observe - and feel - when they step into a disaster zone.
The Latin Catholic Church in İskenderun, Türkiye, March 2023. The laser scanner stands at the altar; the apse has collapsed, open to the sky. The community gave the EEFIT team access to record the structure. Photograph: EEFIT / Yasemin Didem Aktas.
A blog born in a pandemic
The Mw 6.9 Aegean earthquake of 30 October 2020 struck the Turkish and Greek coastlines simultaneously, triggering a tsunami that caused deaths and significant damage on Samos. It was also, of course, the middle of a global pandemic. International travel was severely restricted, and the conventional model of deploying a large multi-disciplinary team to the field was simply not possible.
EEFIT’s response was to assemble a 24-person team, the vast majority of whom would work entirely remotely, supported by four field engineers recruited and briefed without ever meeting their colleagues in person. Two were deployed to the Turkish coastline - Y. Anıl Köşker and Eser Çabuk, both early-career engineers completing postgraduate studies at Middle East Technical University in Ankara - to document earthquake damage in the İzmir region. Two were deployed to Samos - Panagiotis N. Dermanis, an undergraduate student at the University of Patras who happened to be a native of the island, and Martha Esabalioglou, a structural engineer in private practice. Working in pairs on opposite shores of the Aegean, they investigated two different hazard footprints: earthquake and tsunami.
Left: a house in Samos affected by the tsunami, November 2020. Right: Martha Esabalioglou conducting damage survey on Samos. Photographs: EEFIT.
Left: Eser Çabuk and Y. Anıl Köşker, İzmir, Turkey. Right: Panagiotis N. Dermanis, Samos, Greece. Photographs: EEFIT.
What this small field crew achieved under those conditions was remarkable. The Aegean mission produced the highest number of building damage records in EEFIT’s history - under what were, by any measure, the most adverse conditions the organisation had ever operated in. Every record was collected by four people who had never met their wider team, working through pandemic restrictions in two countries, coordinating with a remote group of twenty across multiple time zones.
The blog emerged, in that context, as something the mission genuinely needed. Here were four young engineers doing demanding, important work in genuinely difficult circumstances, separated from the rest of their team by borders, closed institutions and a pandemic. The blog was the place where their work became visible - to the remote team rallying behind them, to the wider engineering community, and to the public. Each daily entry was an act of recognition as much as communication. Crucially, the Aegean blog was almost entirely dedicated to fieldwork - the day’s locations, what was observed, how many buildings were assessed. It was spare, vivid and direct, the natural register of people spending every available hour in the field. That all four were subsequently named as authors on the EEFIT Aegean report was another dimension of that recognition - one that matters in a field where early-career researchers are too often invisible in formal outputs.
The blog also served an additional function that points to future possibilities: it was used to disseminate a public survey running alongside the mission, gathering experiential data from people in the affected areas. This integration of community engagement into the live mission blog - using it as a two-way channel rather than a broadcast - is something we have not yet fully written up, but it represents a significant methodological step. The data collected remain the subject of ongoing work.
The blog was also the only place during the mission where the two narratives - earthquake damage on the Turkish shore and tsunami impact on the Greek island - existed as a single, coherent account in real time. The formal report would eventually integrate the findings; the blog did it day by day. Writing those daily entries was how I stayed connected to four people I had never met in person, working alone or in pairs in two countries during one of the most disruptive periods any of us had experienced. Updating the blog each evening felt like a way of saying: we see you, we know what you did today, and so does everyone else. When Panos assessed 35 buildings in a single day in Karlovasi, that went into the blog. When the sky cleared over Samos and he went back out, that went in too. For a young engineer working in isolation, knowing that a team - and a wider community - was following each day’s work in real time matters more than it might seem.
Scaling up: Kahramanmaraş 2023
The 6 February 2023 earthquake sequence was of an entirely different magnitude - in every sense. The twin Mw 7.8 and 7.7 events caused destruction across multiple provinces, killing over 50,000 people and displacing more than a million. I led the mission jointly with Professor Emily So of the University of Cambridge. Together we deployed a hybrid team of over 30, with 15 members in the field across five days visiting cities and villages in Hatay, Kahramanmaraş, Adana, Osmaniye, Gaziantep and Adıyaman.
An EEFIT team member surveys a severely damaged building in the affected area, March 2023. Photograph: Yasemin Didem Aktas / EEFIT.
The blog for this mission was structured differently from the outset, and that difference reflected the nature of the mission itself. Where the Aegean blog was almost entirely devoted to field observation, the Kahramanmaraş blog wove together fieldwork and desk study - posts from the geotechnics team conducting remote GIS mapping of seismic hazards sat alongside daily field reports; the remote sensing subgroup published satellite analysis while the field teams were still on the ground. This complementarity was deliberate. In a mission with six specialist subgroups operating simultaneously, the blog became the mechanism through which a distributed team could see itself as a whole. The remote team was not a support function operating in the background - it was visible, named, and present in the same public record as the people in the field.
Specific moments from the field blog illustrate what reconnaissance actually looks like: the geotechnics team uncovering an earthquake-induced landslide dam at Değirmencik, identified first through satellite imagery by the remote team and then visited by the field team - a direct example of the two modes of working feeding each other in real time. The structures team laser-scanning the severely damaged Latin Catholic Church in İskenderun, having gained access through the local community. The infrastructure team documenting the collapse of Antakya University Hospital and grappling with what the failure of healthcare infrastructure means in the hours and days after a major earthquake.
Aerial view of earthquake damage in the affected area, with EEFIT team members visible. Photograph: EEFIT.
The EEFIT Kahramanmaraş field team, March 2023. Photograph: EEFIT.
The blog also carried something that a technical report cannot: the human weight of the experience. The post from the last day of fieldwork speaks of witnessing “so much destruction in cities and villages, but also the incredible resilience of the people, solidarity and cooperation, and cascading kindness” of residents in devastated areas offering tea and sharing their stories with a team of foreign engineers who had come to learn from what had happened to them. That dimension of reconnaissance - the relationship between the engineering observer and the affected community - rarely finds its way into formal outputs. The blog holds it.
Antakya old town, October 2023. Photograph: EEFIT / Yasemin Didem Aktas.
The scale of the destruction made it difficult at times to know what register to write in. You are an engineer trained to observe and record, but you are also a human being standing in a city where tens of thousands of people died. The blog had to hold both things - the technical rigour that justifies the mission’s existence, and the honesty about what it means to be there. I am not sure we always got that balance right. But the attempt to get it right, made daily and in public, is itself part of what responsible reconnaissance looks like.
What blogs do that reports cannot
Across both missions, the blog served audiences that formal publications do not reach: the general public following a disaster in the news; policymakers and institutions watching for independent technical assessment; students and early-career engineers seeing, perhaps for the first time, what post-earthquake reconnaissance actually looks like on the ground. It also served the mission teams themselves - sustaining morale, maintaining visibility across a dispersed group, and creating a shared record of what was observed before the analytical work of report-writing began.
There is also an epistemic argument for the blog worth making explicitly. Reconnaissance knowledge is time-sensitive and context-dependent. The observation that a particular failure mode was prevalent in a specific district, noted on day two of a field mission, carries information about sequencing, priority and on-the-ground decision-making that will not survive intact into a report written months later. The blog preserves that texture. It captures uncertainty honestly, in a way that a finalised, peer-reviewed document with its conclusions already settled cannot.
For EEFIT, the blog has become part of the methodology rather than a supplement to it. As the engineering community continues to develop frameworks for rapid, responsible post-disaster reconnaissance, real-time public communication deserves a place in those frameworks - not as an obligation, but as a discipline that makes the work more honest, more visible, and ultimately more useful.
The EEFIT Aegean mission and Kahramanmaraş mission blogs are available to view online.