natural hazards journal

Natural Hazards Journal (30%)

This assignment involves creating a journal that documents natural disasters, on a global scale, that have occurred since July, 2019. You will need to select your own personal ‘top 12’ natural disasters globally, based on your own subjective criteria, and then assess your top 12

according to the following criteria:

• Location of the Disaster (please be as specific as possible)
• Type of Disaster (hurricane, earthquake, eruption, landslide, etc.)
• Dates and times of the disaster
• Progress of cleanup and restoration
• Description of the natural hazard and a short statement as to the cause of the disaster
• Total economic impact due to property damage, lost business, cleanup, and recovery etc., if available (in dollars)
• Destruction report: structures destroyed, people affected, land and livestock impacted.
• Total number of human casualties (injuries and deaths)
• Potential forms of prevention/mitigation: speculate on what could have been done to prevent or reduce the economic damage and number of casualties for each disaster, regardless of potential costs.

Information for this summary can be found on the news, in newspapers, magazines, on the internet, etc. A helpful research tip – it can be helpful to subscribe to newsfeeds/RSS feeds on online news websites, to learn of to keep updated on a daily basis of disasters throughout the world.  key words like – disaster, cyclone, hurricane, tornado, sinkhole, landslide, mudslide, eruption, wildfire, earthquake, etc. If a natural disaster and its subsequent impacts remain ongoing by the assignment deadline, please report as much information as is available up to the assignment due date.

The journal should be structured to contain an approximately 2-3 page summary of each natural disaster, not including images/data tables/maps or other non-text based information.

For the Natural Hazards Journal, please do ensure to use references – while it can be difficult to find purely academic references for the events themselves, please look for the best, most reliable sources of information. Wikipedia does not fit either of those descritpions.

For example….

The following links provide good, relatively reliable information on the 7.8M Earthquake that occurred yesterday (July 21, 2020) SSE of Perryville, Alaska – many of you may have heard on this Earthquake and subsequent Tsunami warning for the Pacific Coastal region (the warning has not be lifted).

Here is an example of a good article, which also provides links to background information

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/earthquake-alaska-tsunami-1.5658406

https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/us7000asvb/map

While a lot of social media posts and assorted articles can be found on any topic, do your best to look for articles that report the data regarding the events.

Final piece of advise – financial impacts of natural hazards are hard to measure, as the long-term economic recovery can be difficult to assess in a universal fashion. For example – when infrastructure is damaged, it can be straightforward to quantify those repair costs. When house insurance rates change, hospitalization and medical costs, social costs, and the like are taken into consideration, as they should be for a total cost analysis, it can be difficult to assign an ‘end date’ to when these costs will be incurred. If you do not find cost information for your hazards, feel free to speculate on what costs SHOULD be assessed for the event.