  During and after disasters, highways provide vital routes for emergency
services, relief efforts, and evacuation activities. Thus, a timely and
reliable assessment of disaster impacts on highways is critical for
decision-makers to quickly and effectively perform relief and recovery efforts.
Recently, social media has increasingly been used in disaster management for
obtaining a rapid, public-centric assessment of disaster impacts due to its
near real-time, social and informational characteristics. Although promising,
the employment of social media for assessing disaster impacts on highways is
still limited due to the inability of extracting accurate highway-related data
from social media. To overcome this limitation, a systematic approach is
proposed to identify highway-related data from social media for assessing
disaster impacts on highways, and a case study of Hurricane Harvey in Houston,
TX is employed for the demonstration. The approach is constructed through three
steps: (1) building data sources for social media and highways of interest in
Houston, respectively; (2) adapting the social media data to each highway
through a developed mapping algorithm; (3) assessing disaster impacts through
analyzing social media activities in terms of their intensity, geographic, and
topic distributions. Results show that the proposed approach is capable of
capturing the temporal patterns of disaster impacts on highways. Official news
and reports are employed to validate the assessed impacts.
