The task was to come up with a case study for a recent earthquake. Rather than trot out Kobe again for the 6th year, I decided to look for a more recent event.
The RELIEF WEB site is the main resource for identifying events which have required a relief effort (not just natural hazards). This gave information on the Indian earthquake of January 2001.
The first task is to locate the area. There are several sites which would have been able to provide a general outline of INDIA, or one could be traced from an Atlas. Each event on the Reliefweb site has a MAPS link. Several of the maps were large .pdf format images, but I found some gifs, and printed out a map showing the immediate area. This was then turned into an outline map and some questions were produced: labelling of epicentre, national borders, sea areas, nearby towns, areas of highland etc.
Information was required on the earthquake. Normally in an examination one would expect to know:
- date / time if relevant e.g Kobe earthquake timing was critical to the effect it had in some areas
- location of epicentre
- casualties, damage to property, effect on infrastructure, damage to specific buildings or locations of particular importance - this rather trivialises the event, but is necessary to build up a picture relative to other earthquakes
Questions were then formulated. I decided to make this an exercise in making sense of data from lots of various sources: a comprehension type exercise. Small groups could be formed, with each one taking responsibility for developing a particular 'area' e.g damage, long term relief efforts etc.
The Reliefweb site has over 10 months of updates since the event, so the slow recovery of the area could be traced.
Add one specific fact about the earthquake taken from the information into each box on the table below: original was greyed slightly. These could then be guillotined out, and arranged in classified groups or rows.
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Put one specific fact in each box.