Choose ONE of the following events:
. 1) Chile's 1960 earthquake and tsunami ?
. 2) Alaska's 1964 earthquake and tsunami ?
. 3) China's 2008 Sichuan earthquake ?
. 4) Nepal's 2014 earthquake
The over-arching goal of the assignment is to consider what we can learn from a past event to inform how we prepare for hazard events in the future.
Write an executive summary for the government of the country related to the event you have chosen, discussing the facts of the event and your suggestions for future mitigation strategies. Your summary should be approximately 4 pages long (double-spaced, 12 point font), and no more than 5 pages including citations.
It should include the following information:?1) An outline of the physical event that occurred - how strong was the earthquake/tsunami? Where was its epicenter? What secondary physical events occurred after the earthquake (e.g., liquefaction, landslides)? Was the timeline of the event important?
2) What factors turned the physical event into a disaster? Where did it hit (e.g., a major population center or farmland)? What killed most people (e.g., collapse of buildings, fire, disease)? Did human activities exacerbate the event in any way? Did mitigation efforts help to minimize damage?
3) What mitigation recommendations would you put forward for the future? This section must relate clearly to your previous two sections. What have you learned from your research that helps you to put forward these suggestions?
As this is an executive summary, it is appropriate to use sub-headings to divide up the sections of the paper. You may also use bullet points, but make sure you still write in full sentences and do not to resort to bullet points as a way to simply write less.
What is the learning goal of this paper?
This paper is designed to see if you can research the facts of an event and then make valid deductions from what you have learned. As such, I want to see solid research in the first two sections of the paper. This requires citations! If there is any disagreement over what happened, it is appropriate to make that clear in these initial sections.
The third part of your paper may be entirely your own suggestions for mitigation, or your interpretation of what you consider to be the best combination of mitigation approaches that others have suggested. This section may therefore include many citations or just a few. Regardless, the key thing that I want to see is that this third section of your paper is developed logically from the information you presented in the first two sections. For instance, if you have concluded in section two that the major risk for loss of life was building collapse, it would be perfectly valid to discuss improved buildings strategies in section three. By contrast, it would not follow logically to say that scientists had no indication that an earthquake was about to occur and then discuss early evacuation strategies as an appropriate mitigation strategy.
Sources
NO WIKIPEDIA. You will be expected to use academic sources (e.g., book chapters and journal articles) for at least some of your sources. As some of these events were quite recent, you may also use information from reliable agencies such as the USGS. You may also use news articles from reputable newspapers such as the New York Times or BBC News. In total, you should find at least five sources. Academic sources do not have to be specific to this event, but can discuss the hazards and impacts in general.