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Rapid appraisal of damages related to hazard events is of importance to first responders, government agencies, insurance industries, and other private and public organizations. While satellite monitoring, ground-based sensor systems, inspections and other technologies provide data to inform post-disaster response, crowdsourcing through social media is an additional and novel data source. In this study, the use of social media data, principally Twitter postings, is investigated to make approximate but rapid early assessments of damages following a disaster. The goal is to explore the potential utility of using social media data for rapid damage assessment after sudden-onset hazard events and to identify insights related to potential challenges. This study defines a text-based damage assessment scale for earthquake damages, and then develops a text classification model for rapid damage assessment. Although …