Natural Disaster's Final

Disaster Summary

The Disaster Summary is to be turned in on (or just before) the last day of classes. This will be your final. The disaster summary should only consider natural disasters.

The Disaster Summary will consist of information, as outlined below, on the eight worst disasters that have occurred during the time period of the course. The worst disasters will be those with the greatest number of casualties and/or economic damage. It is possible that each person's list of the worst 8 disasters will differ as in some cases not enough information is available to determine the actual economic damage. In order to come up with the worst 8 each person will have to keep track of all disasters throughout the time period of the course, then determine which of the disasters are among the worst 8.

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.

The final disaster summary must be typed and should include the following information

  • Type of Disaster (i.e hurricane, earthquake, eruption, landslide, etc.)
  • Beginning date of the disaster
  • Location of the Disaster (some countries are large, so just reporting the country is not sufficient).
  • A description of the disaster and a detailed description as to the cause 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
  • Mitigation - A well thought out statement of what, if anything could have been done by humans 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.
  • Sources of information (APA 6th)

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 earn a zero.

The Disaster Summary must be in chronological order (earliest to latest) as near as is possible. Part of the grade will be based on the ease with which the instructor can read and grade the summary - appearance will count. I suggest a table format.

Disaster Summary Rubric (how you will be graded)

Adapted from Stephen A. Nelson’s Disaster Summary http://www.tulane.edu/~sanelson/geol204/index.html