Geography 2272 – Natural Hazards
Disaster Summary
Due: Friday December 8th, 2017 at 12:30 PM
The purpose of this assignment is to help you develop critical thinking and summary skills by reviewing multiple sources of evidence about natural hazards and disasters. It will also help strengthen your research skills as you will be required to access and examine the content of multiple information sources, as you to track disasters that happen over the scope of the course.
As noted in the syllabus, the Disaster Summary is worth 25% of your grade. The Disaster Summary should only consider natural disasters – those that occur without the aid of humans. Such things as oil and toxic materials spills, airplane crashes (unless caused by something like a hurricane or volcanic eruption), and human induced explosions should not be considered. Keep in mind that many natural disasters are exacerbated by human actions.
The Disaster Summary will consist of information, as outlined below, on the 7 worst disasters that have occurred during the time period of the December 1, 2016 to November 30, 2017. The worst disasters will be those with the greatest number of casualties and/or economic damage.
In order to come up with the worst 7, each student will have to keep track of all disasters throughout the time period of the course as well as research ones that have happened before the course started. Before the summary is due, students must determine which of the disasters are among the worst 7. You should keep in mind that disasters with only one or two casualties and/or one or two damaged structures are not likely to be among the worst 7, and thus can probably be safely ignored when you come across such events.
Using news subscription services such as those available on google.com and/or yahoo.com (which send you email based on key words) is the best way to keep updated on disasters throughout the world. Use key words – disaster, cyclone, hurricane, tornado, sinkhole, landslide, mudslide, eruption, wildfire, earthquake, etc. Although these generate lots of email, you can quickly read the summaries to determine which ones have the potential for being among the 7 worst. You can then go to the links for these potentially worst disasters, print the web pages, and keep them for ultimately determining the worst disasters.
Note that not all information on a disaster usually comes out with the first news release. In other words, imagine that there is flood that begins somewhere on October 17th. On the first day 250 homes are flooded resulting in 40 million dollars in property damage, with no lives lost. But the flooding continues for another two weeks. Each day the news media reports new events, such as number of new homes flooded, number of lives lost, loss estimates in various towns, etc. You should try to keep track of all of this information for your summary. What you will turn in at the end of the course is a summary of each disaster, rather than the notes you keep to compile this summary.
Also, events like earthquakes and volcanic eruptions that occur in sparsely populated areas, even though they may be large events, if they don’t cause casualties or property damage, are not likely to be among the 7 worst disasters.
A disaster like a drought is also difficult to keep track of because they have no beginning date, a fuzzy ending date, and damage estimates only come out sporadically. Because of this, the summary of the 7 worst disasters will not include droughts.
For any disaster that begins during the semester, but is not completely finished by the end of the semester, you should report as much information that is available up to the deadline to turn in the log.
The final disaster summary must be typewritten (single spaced). Each disaster MUST fit on a single page, and should include the following information:
- Location of the Disaster (be careful here – countries like Indonesia, Russia, and China are large countries, so just reporting the country name is not a sufficient location).
- Type of Disaster (i.e hurricane, earthquake, eruption, landslide, etc.)
- Beginning and ending dates and times of the disaster
- The total economic loss due to property damage, lost business, downtime, cleanup, and recovery etc., if available (in dollars). If a monetary figure is not available, provide information on such things as the number of structures destroyed, the number of people affected, the number of acres destroyed, number of livestock destroyed, etc.
- The total number of human casualties (injuries and deaths)
- A description of the disaster and a short statement as to the cause of the disaster (use as many specific “geographic”, or course terms, as possible). You should have a “timeline” of the disaster – what happened and when? How did things change in the days/weeks/months following the disaster? Why is the disaster #1 or #4 – why is it in that spot?
- Mitigation – A well thought out statement of what, if anything could have been done to have prevented or reduced the economic damage and number of casualties for each disaster. This mitigation statement will be a significant part of your grade on this assignment. These are YOUR ideas, not those of the articles you read. You may reference the ideas of others, but remember that your instructor is reading the news too, and if you try to pass off the mitigation statements as your own ideas, plagiarism will be noted and the University Policies on plagiarism will be followed
- Sources of information (Newspaper and magazine articles, internet URLs, etc). All information should be accurately referenced in APA format with all references listed at the end of the paper. Note: the final references list should break the references up “by disaster”, so that someone could flip to the back and see a list of references for each disaster separately.
- Information on APA can be found at: http://libguides.library.curtin.edu.au/content.php?pid=141214&sid=1335391
- If you wish, you may use endnotes for your work, so you don’t have to do the traditional APA formatting of (author, year) in the text. If you choose this option, your endnotes should be formatted so that each page starts with “1…”. The references section at the back would be formatted with a title for each disaster and the references for that disaster clearly labelled 1, 2, 3…, but the references themselves need to be in APA format.
- You will have A LOT of references; between 75-150 is typical and expected.
Although you may work with others on this log, the final work must be yours, in your own words. Thus, exact duplicates or logs that are copied word for word from another person will be considered plagiarized and appropriate action will be taken by the instructor.
The Disaster Summary must be in order of disaster, from worst disaster to least damaging disaster. Each disaster should be single spaced, written on an individual page, and must fit onto that single page.
You must have an introduction (1 page single spaced) leading the summary and giving a brief overview of your material. Do not list the disasters, but instead discuss the semester in general terms and identify what material you are about to discuss in your report. This is not a ‘nothing’ page – it is an important part of the material. This is where you justify WHY each disaster was first, or third, or seventh instead of eighth. You use this page to explain the relevance of the disasters.
You must also have a conclusion (1 page single spaced) where you summarize the key findings (what did you note about the 7 worst disasters? What are the main themes? Was the damage located in a particular part of the world? Were there any significant contrasts? For example, in 2010, there were two earthquakes (Chile and Haiti) that had similar magnitudes, but very different damage patterns. Noting this, and why the pattern occurred, would occur in the conclusion.
In the conclusion you could also make a statement about mitigation options for the various disasters – where are they successful? Where are they not? Why?
You will hand in 14+ pages of material: the first page, page 1, is the title page, page 2 is the introduction, pages 3-9 are the 7 disasters, page 10 is the conclusion/summary, pages 11+ are the reference section. The final page is the marking rubric.
Part of the grade will be based on the ease with which your paper can be read and graded – appearance will count. You have a lot of material to fit into a small space. You need to be concise! Make sure the material is spaced well and easily legible.
Do NOT turn in binders or covers. Stapled sheets of paper are all that is required. Use Times New Roman 12 point typeface and reasonable (0.75 or 1 inch) margins and single space your work. You will lose marks if these directions are not followed.
Marking rubric to be provided on UM Learn. You must attach the marking rubric as the last page of your assignment and 5 marks will be deducted if it is not present.
