Natural Disaster Management

Catalog description

This course covers the basic principles of natural disaster management in the United States. This course highlights several hazard types as topical investigations, as well as the processes and considerations of management options for preparedness, response, recovery, and mitigation. This will include, but not be limited to, understanding basic natural hazard mechanisms, the range of physical and human impacts, linkages to demographic and environmental transitions, and both structural and non-structural mitigation techniques. All management techniques are framed within existing U.S. federal guidelines, however management techniques covered in this course may be applied widely. The course covers organization, operations, training, and other issues associated with the management of natural disasters. The student will participate in a simulation taking on a decision-making role and must react to information about a specific natural disaster that develops over a series of weeks. The students will be presented with a series of weather-related information and will be assigned a specific role. They must make leadership decisions on how they will utilize their resources responding regularly to the incident commander (course professor) explaining what actions need to be carried out along with their rationale for their actions. Wrapping up the scenario, a Hot Wash is conducted with three UP (good) things and three DOWN (need improvement) things and provided to the incident commander so that the student will be able to better handle the next disaster as a lessons-learned phase.