A major assignment in this course is the preparation of a collaborative research project on the array of hazards that are particularly salient in the city of Long Beach. The project has several learning outcomes:

• becoming deeply familiar with local hazards
• gaining practice in working in teams, which is a common feature of the working life of geographers, environmental scientists, and planners in government service, the corporate sector, consultancies, non-governmental organizations, international organizations, and education
• 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

Each group will be researching a particular hazard or set of hazards. You need to become very familiar with Long Beach and the physical environmental and infrastructural features and factors that may pose risks to the community and with social variations that may indicate heightened vulnerabilities. Here are a few guidelines of things to consider as the report evolves.

Systematically identify which natural hazards Long Beach shares with the rest of Southern California, being located in what Mike Davis has called the "Themepark of the Apocalypse." The USGS, the California Geological Survey, FEMA, CalOES, Firescope, the Southern California Wildfire Hazard Center, 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.

Identify any natural or technological hazards that are more locally dangerous to the community, that is, which pose a more than generically Southern California pall of risk. You might find the EPA web site useful here.

For those hazards identified, what are their probability distributions? Can you find information saying that there's such-and-such a probability of an event of a given magnitude being experienced or exceeded? You are trying to quantify risks as much as you can.

Assess risks of architectural failure. A good proxy measure for potential problems is the age of structures: Older buildings were built to older codes, and buildings deteriorate with age and imperfect maintenance. Census data provide information on the age structure and median ages of owner-occupied and renter-occupied dwelling units. Caltrans has data on the current status of bridges.

Assess social vulnerability. What kinds of people live in the communities making up Long Beach in terms of income, ethnicity, language, and age structure, which you can get from the Census (remember that lab in GEOG 200?). Do you have local knowledge of other social groups which might have differential social vulnerability? (e.g., concentrations of mobility-hindered people, perhaps lifestyle groups, perhaps military veterans or other likely gender-biased groupings). What kinds of people are found in Long Beach? How do they differ demographically across space?

Assess social resources for responding to a disaster. Where might evacuation areas be set up? Are there any special problems in the community itself in terms of disaster cascades or emergency response (e.g., chemicals, radionuclides, biohazards)?

View the City's General Plan, particularly its "Safety Element," to see what sorts of emergency and disaster management issues are discussed. What's in there? Has a disaster struck the City before? How did it fare then?

After pulling together this information, evaluate it critically and prepare a summary of the local situation for the specific hazard your group is working on and recommendations for any weaknesses in the General Plan to ensure capacity to respond to local disaster with both efficiency and equity.

Now, boil all this down to a 15 minute presentation, illustrated in probably not more than a dozen or so viewgraphs (e.g., PowerPoint) featuring maps, and practice/practice/practice, so that your presentation goes smoothly and professionally.

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. 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. Each person MUST have a different rank, and the whole group HAS to have an average score of 5. 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). 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).

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 2/3 and yours 1/3. 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, not just 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.

The day of the presentation, bring in an executive summary of your findings in paper form (probably about 5 pages), relevant maps, a bibliography and list of image sources, as well as your team "personnel evaluations." Executive summaries convey the basic conclusions of the research and a list of (often bulleted) recommendations in language that "even a manager" can understand. They are common elements in the front of major consulting reports.

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Last revision: 01/24/09