CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, LONG BEACH Geography 458/558-01: Hazards and Risk Management S/08 ticket # 7910 / 7930 MW 2-3:15 p.m. in LA4-102

Instructor Information:

Instructor: Dr. C.M. Rodrigue

E-mail: rodrigue@csulb.edu

Instructor's Home Page: http://www.csulb.edu/~rodrigue

Course Home Page: http://www.csulb.edu/~rodrigue/geog458558

Office: LA4-106

Telephones: (526) 985-4895 or -8432

Mailbox: LA4-106

Office Hours: M 3:30-4:45 p.m.; W 11 a.m.-12:15 p.m.; and by appointment

Course Description:

Prerequisite: one earth science course (Geography 140 or 150 or Geology 102 or 163 or 190 or permission of the instructor) and one social science course (e.g., Geography 100 or 160 or permission of the instructor).

Provides a broad overview of hazards and disasters, whether natural or partly technological. This course emphasizes understanding of the physical and social dynamics that must interact to produce hazard, the spatial and temporal distributions of various hazards, and policy options for disaster preparation and loss reduction.

Course Concerns:

Earthquakes, tsunami, wildfires, mudslides, floods, droughts, and other disasters continue to kill and injure, sometimes thousands of people at once and other times over an extended period of time (e.g., the Sumatra earthquake and tsunami in 2004, the Pakistan earthquake of 2005, the Bhuj earthquake in Gujarat, India, in 2001, the Kobe earthquake of 1995, Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Hurricane Mitch in 1998, the Nevado Ruiz eruption of 1985, and several African droughts), particularly in the Third World but sometimes in the developed world, too (Katrina underscoring that possibility in 2005). Economic losses have accelerated far beyond inflation, with the United States alone experiencing arguably $100 billion of losses in Katrina, $40 billion in the Northridge earthquake, at least $20 billion in Hurricane Andrew, and more than $15 billion in the 1993 Midwest floods. For a variety of global environmental and social reasons, these losses are projected to increase at increasing rates into the foreseeable future. Hazards and the disasters they generate, thus, are inherently engaging subjects. They also depend on a multidisciplinary approach for their investigation and mitigation, bringing in the insights of natural scientists, social scientists, engineers, planners, and others. Geography is a very active discipline in the investigation of hazards, with its physical science, social science, and mapping traditions, as well as its ability to integrate these very different approaches.

Course Objectives

Upon successful completion of this course, students should be able to:

• understand the basic physical dynamics creating various hazards (e.g., earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunami, wildfire, floods and landslides, and hurricanes and other extreme weather events)
• analyze the underlying probability distributions of various hazards, including magnitude and frequency distributions for different hazards
• grasp hazardousness as a naturally given and socially constructed attribute of place, which varies across space
• appreciate the value of spatial analysis, mapping, GIS, and remote sensing for risk assessment and real-time management of disasters and their effects
• understand specific ways that technological mitigations can both reduce and exacerbate hazards in different circumstances
• analyze the economic and political contexts and impacts of hazards and the social construction of differential vulnerability to hazards
• understand common perceptions of, and behaviors in, risky situations and the human attachment to risky places
• analyze different policy options for mitigating and preparing for disaster and managing emergency situations
• appreciate that hazards research is inherently interdisciplinary and value all relevant approaches to understanding and dealing with a given hazard (e.g., natural sciences, social sciences, engineering, arts and humanities, and government and business policy)
• show professional research, analysis, writing, and presentation skills

Reading Materials:

Required Textbook:

Smith, Keith. 2004. Environmental Hazards: Assessing Risk and Reducing Disaster, 4th. ed. London and New York: Routledge.

Other Required Readings:

Other readings (articles and web pages) will be assigned throughout the semester.

Grading:

Grading is based on a midterm, a final, a critical review of articles on a topic of your choosing, and a collaborative research project. The exams comprise a mix of objective questions and short essays. If you are an undergraduate, the critical review will compare and contrast at least five sources on a hazards-related topic of your choosing, of which at least four sources must be articles from refereed research journals. If you are a graduate student, this review paper will critically analyze ten sources, of which eight must be articles from refereed research journals. Graduate students are expected to focus more than undergraduates on comparison and contrast of data and methods used in the research articles. The collaborative project will entail small student groups collecting information on hazards facing particular communities in Southern California and then presenting them to the class in an illustrated "consultants' report."

The allocation of grade points is as follows:

25% = midterm examination
25% = final examination
25% = critical review
25% = collaborative report and presentation

Makeup Policy

Makeups are possible in the event of a documented unexpected emergency in a student's life or through prior arrangement with the instructor when the student has advance knowledge of a conflict in schedule, including jury duty or other governmental obligation; death, injury, or serious illness/caretaking responsibilities in the household or family; work-related issues; certain University sanctioned activities; or religious obligations and observances. Makeups under these circumstances will not be penalized with prior notice or documentation. Scheduling a plane flight before the final is not a compelling conflict in schedule and will be penalized. All other makeup requests, especially those requested after the fact or unsupported by documentation, are subject to denial or serious penalty.

Tentative List of Topics

• What is hazard?
  • What is natural hazard?
  • What is technological hazard?
  • What is the difference between risk and vulnerability?
• Risk assessment science
  • Dealing with inherently uncertain situations
  • Epistemological problems
  • Type I and Type II errors
• Risk management policy
  • Safeguard human life at all costs
  • Minimize regulatory burden
• How policy preferences affect risk assessment
  • Hearing only epistemologically most rigorous results can increase dangers of a Type II error and raise risk to human life
  • Epistemological tolerance raises risk of a Type I error and imposes opportunity costs
  • Costs and benefits of creating a firewall between assessment and management
• The magnitude and frequency issue
  • Reducing recurrent low level hazards can raise vulnerability to catastrophic events
  • Costs versus benefits of mitigating low probability but high impact events
• GIScience and hazards
  • GIS, remote sensing, and cartography in assessing risk
  • Real-time application of the geospatial techniques during a disaster
• Case studies
  • Natural hazards
    • Earthquakes
    • Tsunami
    • Volcanoes
    • Hurricanes
    • Floods and storms
    • Fires
    • Droughts
    • Avalanches
  • Technological hazards
    • Chemical regulation
    • Space exploration

Withdrawal Policy

It is the student's responsibility to withdraw from classes. Instructors have no obligation to withdraw students who do not attend classes and, because of the bureaucratic difficulty involved, generally choose not to do so. This often catches transfer students by surprise, because community colleges require instructors to drop non-attending students and provide easy and routine mechanisms for them to do so. If you've been "spoiled" by that system, please be aware that it doesn't work that way here.

The deadline to withdraw from a class without a "W" showing up on your transcript is 10 February. You can withdraw until 10 p.m. that night through My CSULB. You can withdraw later, until 25 April, but you'll have a "W" show up on your transcript. From 25 April to 16 May, you can only withdraw for a documented serious and compelling emergency, with the approval of the dean's office, which expects that you are dropping all of your classes because of the seriousness of the emergency. Note: "I'm not doing well in this class, so I have to drop it" is not regarded as a serious and compelling emergency. Here are the various deadlines for Spring 2008: http://www.csulb.edu/depts/enrollment/dates/registration_spring.html.

Accessibility

It is the student's responsibility to let me know at the beginning of the semester if s/he has a disability that may require accommodation. I am personally committed to making my classes accessible and providing accommodations that will help everyone have the same chance at success. I need to know about the issue at the beginning of the semester, though, so that we can work out a mutually reasonable and satisfying accommodation. For more information on campus support services for disabled students, please check out http://www.csulb.edu/divisions/students2/dss.

Related to accessibility, this course will be set up on BeachBoard to enable convenient contact. You will need to have a CSULB e-mail account to use BeachBoard, however. Announcements and messages from me to the class may come by e-mail. If you do not check your CSULB e-mail account regularly but use another account instead, please set your CSULB account so that it will automatically forward messages to your other account. Alternatively, you can use web-mail to check your CSULB e-mail, the way many of you use Hotmail, Yahoo, or G-mail. The web page is https://webmail.csulb.edu. The CSULB Technology Help Desk is available for students, by the way. The URL for the Help Desk is http://helpdesk.csulb.edu. Their telephone number is (562) 985-4959.

Policy on Cheating and Plagiarism

Written work that you hand in is assumed to be original unless your source material is documented appropriately. Using the ideas or words of another person, even a peer, or a web site, as if it were your own, is plagiarism. Simply changing the wording around so that it's not a direct quotation is still plagiarism if you don't give credit to the source of the ideas. If you use the exact wording of your source, enclose the statement in quotation marks or (with longer quotations) indent and single space it and then cite the source and page. When in doubt, cite. Cheating and plagiarism are serious academic offenses: They represent intellectual theft. Students should read the section on cheating and plagiarism in the CSULB catalogue, which can be accessed at http://www.csulb.edu/divisions/aa/catalog/07-08/campus_info/cheating.html.

Furthermore, students should be aware that faculty members have a range of academic actions available to them in cases of cheating and plagiarism. At a minimum, I will give a student cheating or plagiarizing on a particular assignment a failing grade on that assignment, but only if I think that there was some misunderstanding about what these offenses are; if I feel that the decision to cheat or plagiarize was intentional, I will fail a student in the course. I also may then refer the student to Judicial Affairs for possible probation, suspension, or dismissal.

When in doubt, please ask me if you think you're getting into a grey area. To learn a little more about plagiarism, take a look at this workshop on ethics in science that several faculty put together: The second section is about plagiarism. http://www.csulb.edu/geography/gdep/ethics.html. .

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Last revision: 01/25/08