And then something happened – UNIV 300i – C.M. Rodrigue
Class 1
What is a natural hazard? What is a disaster?
Physical dynamics and social process must be considered
Trends in disaster overall
What happened to New Orleans is the interaction of a hurricane and the
human altered Mississippi River, coastal wetlands, and soils, with a large
population at risk and extreme variations in the social vulnerability to the
winds and flooding of a hurricane
What is risk? What is vulnerability?
Complex cascades of linking hazards
Stages (cycles) of disaster: assessment, mitigation, preparation, event,
emergency response, restoration, reconstruction, commemorative reconstruction
What, exactly, is recovery?
Class 2
Hurricanes
How hurricanes form and travel and eventually end
Structure of a hurricane
Sources of damage from a hurricane
Hurricane classification
Changes in the magnitude-frequency relationship of hurricanes
Hurricane cyclicity
Global warming?
Increasing social vulnerability to hurricanes
Class 3
Flooding: riparian, lacustrine, coastal
Riparian: Old Man River
How rivers behave
The forces generated by moving water (F = ma) and a sideline on why the
cemeteries failed
How human society copes with these natural processes technologically:
levees, floodgates
Magnitude and frequency again
How response to recurrent small magnitude floods creates vulnerability to
the rare, large magnitude event
Lacustrine flooding
Bayous and oxbows
Lac Pontchartrain
Coastal flooding
Tsunami
Hurricanes: the surge, winds, tides
How wetlands can protect a coast from the brunt of a hurricane
Why the Gulf Coast is losing its wetlands
The soils of New Orleans and the problem of subsidence: Making things worse
Class 4
Hazard perception: generally faulty when compared with risk assessment
science
Hazard perception is a function of hazard experience
Media and risk amplification and risk attenuation
How media represent hazards and disasters: sensationalism, blameseeking, human conflict and drama, false balance in coverage,
simplification, systematic social biases in normal coverage that may play
out during a disaster
Why are the media like this? the need for profit, ownership concentration,
filtering
Why is this important? Agenda-setting and risk communication
How people behave during a disaster
Evacuation and its hazards
Looting
Convergence
Community self-organization
How people behave between disasters
Mitigation
Preparation
Denial
Conflicts among competing demands on time and resources
Class 5
How agencies behave during a disaster
How government and non-governmental organizations learn of a disaster
(media…)
Models of institutional failure
The difficult relationship between risk assessment science and risk
management policy
Risk assessment communication upward in a bureaucracy
Risk management policy communication downward in a
bureaucracy
Cronyism in a bureaucracy compounds the underlying problem
One model of effective response: incident command system
Class 6
Risk and vulnerability
Plans fail by treating human populations as undifferentiated person-units
Who’s at risk?
Who’s vulnerable? Axes of vulnerability:
Class and income
Race and its intersection with class and income
Language
Age
Gender
Mobility and disability
Sexuality and stigma
Culture and religion
Mental illness
What do you do with the incarcerated? (Mont Pélé in Martinique)
Was Katrina/Rita a freak accident that no-one could have anticipated?
Are other city-destroying disasters possible in our lifetimes? What can we in
California learn about a hazard we don’t get in a place far, far away?