Insuring Disasters

People have always chosen to live in potentially dangerous places.  Surprisingly, the Jersey shore is one of them; hurricanes, tropical storms, and nor'easters do hit and cause major damage from flooding and high winds.  If you owned an insurance company, would you be willing to sell policies to homeowners on the Jersey shore?  If not, why not?  If so, what would you do to protect your company from a huge loss in case the perfect storm hits the shore?

Psychology of Natural Disasters

Our guest speaker, Gabe Navarro, spoke to us about the psychology of natural disasters. What would you do if a tsunami was approaching? How would you feel afterwards? What would you do about those feelings?

Tsunami Tank

Today we were visited by Mike Kalczynski from the Rutgers-Newark Geosciences Department. He helped us learn about how tsunami occur, and we generated and measured our own. What did you learn about tsunami today? Please post a comment of 4-6 sentences. The tsunami washes away several people and sucks them out to sea.
Ahmad calculates the run up and wave height from our experimental data.

Vitor and Zakee mark the wave height. Below, Christian and Jalen look for the wave pull back location.

Welcome!

Hello, and thank you for visiting the blog of the Natural Disasters class at St. Benedict's Prep. My first question to the students is this: What is your opinion about whether or not insurance companies should insure people's property that is in a known disaster zone (i.e., shorefront property in Florida, on the San Andreas fault in California, etc.)? Please explain your stance.