User:WilyMango/group3

Link to 2016-2017 Zimbabwe flood disaster working area.

User:WilyMango/sandbox2 is my working area for overview and lessons learned text and sources.

Group Three Project Ideas (old)

Hello Group Three! Now that I've completed training, this will be a better platform to share topics and ideas for this assignment.

As of Thursday, here in Hawaii (linking is fun!), I identified four good project candidates from the list of nearly 1,000 stubs found in WikiProject Disaster Management.

1. The 2022 Antananarivo Floods. As you'll see, it's pretty sparse. The situation, however, is quite interesting and has a huge impact on human health and well-being. Two large storms, Tropical Storm Ana and Cyclone Batsirai hit Antananarivo within a few weeks of each other, and were preceded by heavy rainfall. The compounded flooding killed nearly 100, and unhoused 100,000 or more.
2. Another shockingly undocumented but serious tragedy is the Great Portland Fire of 1866. I've never been to the town and hadn't heard of the fire before, but seems to have leveled the place, destroying 1,500 structures and leaving 10,000 unhoused. Famous poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow hails from the place and described the damage shortly after, which is one of several potentially interesting angles to pursue. I'd like to find more academic texts on this, but suspect that someone has written about it.
3. The 2012 Sahel Drought caused a famine that affected up-to 19m people across Africa, but the Wikipedia entry is incomplete. Further, there are interesting angles to consider that compounded problems: a coup in Mali, locust plague, and the cumulative effects of drought in the Sahel, as it was not the first in recent years. Plus, it's been studied, so there seems to be good academic evidence and policy suggestions available.
4. Forgive me, Michel, if this hits too close to home. I understand why you may not want to study this, or conversely, the opposite. The 2016–2017 Zimbabwe floods caused by Cyclone Dineo killed at-least 246, displaced 2,000, and left more to face the consequences of famine, reconstruction, and related gender violence for years to come. It also arrived on the heels of a el niño driven droughts. Some have also studied the disaster response and characteristics contributing to recovery, which might be an interesting angles to explore. I think that there's quite a bit we can do here to add details and give disaster some respect.

So, what do you think? Others to add? I considered a few more, namely the Great Fire of Hakodate, which destroyed the city shortly after Japan's surrender of WWII, which made living conditions worse but led to revolutionary civil engineering that might be inspiring. Unfortunately much of the research is in Japanese, which I thought might complicate the assignment. Another was the 1754 Cairo earthquake, which sounds fascinating and may have impacted the trajectory of the Ottoman Empire, but I didn't immediately find any social/medical research papers on this event and its outcomes. However, there were lots of technical ones about the fault, which seem less useful for our application.