A major assignment in this course is the preparation of a collaborative research project on a particular disaster. The project has several learning outcomes:

• becoming deeply familiar with a disaster and the hazardous conditions that produced it or a hazard that could produce a disaster
• understanding that disasters often consist of cascading events: an event that then triggers chains of other events, many of them serious disasters in their own right
• gaining practice in working in teams, which is a common feature of the working life of geographers, geologists, environmental scientists, emergency managers, first-responders, and planners, whether they work in government service, the corporate sector, consultancies, non-governmental organizations, international organizations, and educational institutions.
• acquiring strategies for working with others of varying abilities and motivations to pull off a high caliber product
• developing and sharpening skills at presenting research succinctly and effectively in a public forum
• developing your writing and research skills to a professional level

Each group will be researching a particular event or different aspects of a single event. Given the disaster we're all navigating right now, having all or most of the projects working on some aspect of this moving disaster might be particularly interesting to all of us. If COVID-19 cuts a little too close to home, some of the projects might focus on a more typical set of disasters or hazards.

Possible choices of more typical events include (and feel free to suggest others):

1. the catastrophic fire season of 2018 (Woolsey Fire in Southern California and the Camp Fire that destroyed Paradise in the North State, both in November 2018)
2. the California firestorms of October through December 2017 (the Tubbs Fire being particularly notable in Northern California and the Thomas Fire in Southern California)

3. Hurricane María in mid-to late-September 2017 in Puerto Rico
4. Hurricane Katrina in late August 2005, which struck New Orleans head on
5. Okeechobee Hurricane (aka San Felipe Segundo) hurricane of 1928, which hit Puerto Rico and Florida
6. Hurricane Nine/1939 Long Beach Tropical Storm (yes, we got one, too!)

7. the Tōhoko earthquake, tsunami, and Fukushima reactor failure of March 2011
8. the "Boxing Day" Sumatra earthquake and tsunami of December 26th 2004

9. European heat wave of summer 2003
10. the Russian heat wave and firestorm of 2010
11. the "heat dome" affecting the southern, central, and eastern US in summer 2020 and now 2022 in the middle of COVID-19 (nd/or the changing character of heat waves in general)

12. Oroville Dam crisis that started in February 2017 and, more generally hazards posed by some 50,000 dams that have aged past their 50 year designated life spans)
13. Aliso Canyon failed well and epic methane leak of October 2015 to February 2016
14. the Bhopal disaster of December 1984

15. the Ebola epidemic of December 2013 to March 2016 in West Africa
16. AIDS pandemic of 1981 to present
17. 1918 flu pandemic

18. the California drought of 2012 to 2016 and 2018 to present

19. the great flood in California in 1861-62 (imagine if this were to recur today ... which has been imagined in the ARkStorm scenarios released since 2011 and just recently in the news again)
20. or ???? (I'm open to other disasters of interest to a group)

You need to become very familiar with the physical or biological environmental factors and infrastructural features and factors that created the risk to the community and with social conditions that may have heightened or mitigated vulnerabilities. Here are a few guidelines of things to consider as the report evolves.

Systematically identify the physical or biological hazards that came together in this event. The CDC and WHO, USGS, the California Geological Survey, FEMA, CalOES, the Southern California Earthquake Center, the NOAA National Weather Service, California Department of Water Resources, and California CERES are some sites that can get you started.

Assess architectural, infrastructural, or logistical failures that contributed to the disaster.

Consider cascades of events triggered by earlier events (e.g., lifeline failures, chemical releases, radioactive releases, famine, health effects, etc.). COVID-19 is even now interacting with other disasters and complicating evacuation and emergency response (e.g., hurricanes and the "heat dome" in the US and the port explosion in Beirut)

Assess social vulnerability. What kinds of people lived in the stricken communities in terms of income, ethnicity, language, and age structure. Is the disaster affecting different kinds of people differently? For recent events, you can get relevant data from the Census. Older events may take sleuthing through secondary historical records. COVID-19 information on these issues is sometimes gathered by public health authorities (e.g., L.A. County Department of Public Health) and by media reportage.

Assess social resources deployed (effectively or ineptly) in responding to the disaster. Self-organization by the stricken community members? Government first-response? Non-governmental organizations? Overerall coördination across regions?

Groups may find that a given disaster is so complex and there's so much information on it that they may wish to give brief treatments of the foci above and zero in on some one facet, e.g., something like "livestock and pet evacuation logistics in the Woolsey Fire," "comparing and contrasting two countries' responses to COVID-19," "psychological dimensions of COVID-19," "improving the ability of first-response agencies to protect and serve the homeless during a disaster," "patterns of permanent relocation after a disaster" (Katrina? the Camp Fire that destroyed Paradise?), "applications of volunteered geographic information in disaster," or ?

After pulling together this information, evaluate it critically and prepare an analysis of the disaster and take-away messages or recommendations that contemporary society can draw on to ensure capacity to respond to disaster with both efficiency and equity.

Now, boil all this down to a 10-15 minute presentation, illustrated in probably not more than ten or so viewgraphs (e.g., PowerPoint, Impress) featuring maps, and practice/practice/practice, so that your presentation goes smoothly and professionally. The presentation can be done as a video over Zoom or comparable and made available for asynchronous viewing by all of us.

The group has discretion as to who does which work. Some may find they work on everything together and others may dole work out by specialty and develop logistical mechanisms to keep everyone on task and learning from one another.

During the talk, some groups may co-present with everyone getting a chance to give part of it and other groups may elect the least shy among them to do the oratorial honors.

Make sure your division of labor is at least roughly even, and you need to identify to me which person was responsible for which aspect of the project.

Additionally, I would like each individual to rank everyone in their whole group (themselves included) in terms of how important you felt their work was to the overall success of the group. Place each team member on a 0 through 10 scale, with 5 being the typical average score in a team with an odd number of participants and 5.5 in a team with an even number. Each person MUST have a different (integer) rank, and the whole group HAS to have an average score of 5 or 5.5, depending on the size of your group and the situation in it. Let's say that you really feel that everyone shared pretty closely equally. Then, you'd give out ranks of 4, 5, 6 (15/3 = 5) or 4, 5, 6, 7 (22/4 = 5.5) 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 (25/5 = 5). Let's say that two of you broke your backs on it and the third person was a completely useless slacker. You'd give the slacker a 0 and the other heroic two a 7 and an 8 (15/3 = 5). Two slackers and two heroes? 0, 1, 9, 10 or 1, 2, 8, 9 (20/4 = 5).

I will consider your evaluations of one another along with my own judgment of the quality of sections identified as belonging to one or another team member. I'll weight my judgment 60% and yours 40%. Together, these evaluations may result in somewhat different grades going to different team members. If the project overall was about a B, but one person contributed little and another bent over backwards to overcompensate, the slacker would get a C and the heroic figure might get an A.

I realize that this is uncomfortable for most students, but it is something you will have to do in the "real world," where your judgments might cost someone their livelihood or promotion prospects, not just part of a grade on one assignment. It's also one way to mitigate that natural human tendency to kind of lean on others in group situations.

Each group will upload a report of your findings in paper form (probably about 6-10 pages, double-spaced), relevant maps, a bibliography and list of image sources, as well as your team "personnel evaluations." Also include an "executive summary." Executive summaries convey the basic conclusions of the research and a list of recommendations in language that "even a manager" can understand. These are often presented as bulleted lists. They are common elements in the front of major consulting reports. Yours should be about 1 page.

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Last revision: 08/16/22