Natural Disasters

Tulane University

The Disaster Log

As noted in the syllabus, the Disaster Log is worth 15% of your grade and is to be turned in on the last day of class. The disaster log should only consider natural disasters, that is 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. While the log itself should be kept as an ongoing log throughout the course, only a summary of each disaster that occurs should be turned in. In other words, let's imagine that there is flood that begins somewhere on January 20. 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 log. What you will turn in at the end of the course as your disaster log is a summary of the entire disaster, rather than the notes you keep to compile this summary.

Any disaster that is ongoing at the beginning of the semester is to be considered part of the assignment. (Note that the Katrina disaster is in the recovery stage and is not considered an ongoing disaster for this assignment).  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 log summary must be typewritten and should include the following information

• Location of the Disaster
   
• Type of Disaster
   
• Beginning and ending dates and times of the disaster
   
• A description of the disaster and a short statement 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 and deaths)
  
  
• Sources of information (Newspaper and magazine articles, television and radio reports, and internet URLs)
   
• Mitigation - A 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.

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 a violation of the honor code.

Entries in the disaster logs must be in chronological order as near as is possible.  Part of the grade will be based on the ease with which the instructor can read and grade the log - appearance will count. 

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