The rapid growth in the availability of social media content posted during emergency situations is creating significant interest in research into how this information can be exploited to assist emergency relief operations and to help with emergency preparedness and in early warning systems. We describe the DCU ADAPT Centre participation in the microblog search data challenge at the SMERP 2017 workshop. This task aimed to promote development of information retrieval (IR) methods for practical challenges that need to be addressed during an emergency event, along with comparative evaluation of the methodologies developed for this task. The task is based on a large dataset of microblogs posted during the earthquake in Italy in August 2016, together with a set of query topics provided by the task organisers. For our participation in this task we explored use of three different IR techniques: standard IR query expansion based on an external resource, query expansion based on WordNet and use of query expansion