Updating and Simplifying Great ShakeOut Regional Webpages with Artificial Intelligence-Assisted Processes

Corey L. Rightmyer, Mark Benthien, & Edward Salcido

Submitted August 30, 2026, SCEC Contribution #15484, 2026 SCEC Annual Meeting Poster #188

Great ShakeOut Earthquake Drills began in California in 2008 and have expanded to all U.S. states and territories, with participation worldwide coordinated by SCEC. In 2025, more than 19.3 million people participated nationwide, among more than 60 million people globally. ShakeOut.org is not only a hub for registration, but also a web portal containing descriptions of region-specific earthquake hazards, educational videos and articles, and emergency readiness resources. To ensure that ShakeOut.org remains a trusted source of information, its earthquake content, statistics, and external references must be periodically reviewed and updated. This project addresses these needs via a two-pronged process: updating earthquake hazard descriptions for all U.S. regional ShakeOut pages (60 total, spanning all states and territories plus multi-state region overview pages), and employing AI models to develop a standardized, consolidated page format that facilitates efficient maintenance and simplifies migration to a more modern web server and content management system. Large Language Models, including Claude Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5 Pro, were used to review regional pages, identify commonalities, create preliminary outlines and drafts, and synthesize a template for future pages. The resulting workflow combines LLM-assisted review, outlining, and drafting with manual verification of hazard information, statistics, references, and hyperlinks. This process reduces the time required to update regional earthquake information while promoting consistency, maintainability, and adaptability across ShakeOut.org. The resulting format scales the amount and organization of content to each region’s participation and information needs, including streamlined single-page formats for smaller regions. Overall, this project has demonstrated the potential of integrating artificial intelligence further into ShakeOut website modernization, and further refinement of prompts, input methods, and model parameters may improve processing speed and consistency.

Key Words
earthquake preparedness, AI, artificial intelligence, large language models, website, ShakeOut

Citation
Rightmyer, C. L., Benthien, M., & Salcido, E. (2026, 08). Updating and Simplifying Great ShakeOut Regional Webpages with Artificial Intelligence-Assisted Processes. Poster Presentation at 2026 SCEC Annual Meeting.

Related Projects & Working Groups
Community Capability Building (CCB)