Your Task:

You are the public information officer in the Governor’s Division of Emergency Management, from the Texas Department of Public Safety.  The governor is going to be interviewed on television about the hurricane preparedness plan for the state of Texas.  You are tasked with briefing the governor to prepare the governor for the interview you will need to create:

  •  A briefing document with 10 questions that a journalist would be likely to ask and answers that the governor could use in the interview.  Questions should cover past major hurricanes that have struck the Gulf Coast between 1900 and 2009, how they contributed to flooding, and their impact on human health as a consequence of mosquito-borne diseases that occurred in the wake of these storms.


  • Physical props (charts, tables, and maps) for the interview, including (a) a map that shows the tracks of the 10 most important hurricanes that have made landfall on the Texas Gulf Coast between 1900 and 2009, and (b) a table that summarizes mosquito-borne disease outbreaks associated with each storm.  You may use available health data and news stories or reports to document these outbreaks.


  • A tri-fold pamphlet to inform the public about mosquito-borne disease outbreaks and to provide guidance on how to prevent or mitigate them.  The Texas Department of Public Safety Governor’s Division of Emergency Management will distribute the pamphlets to regional emergency planners and the public.
Essential Questions:

1.    How does water move through different reservoirs in the hydrologic cycle?

2.    What is a hurricane?  What type of weather is associated with a hurricane?

3.    What factors influence the strength or intensity of hurricanes?

4.    How do warm oceans fuel hurricanes?

5.    Hurricanes act as safety valves, moving hot air from the lower to the upper atmosphere and from the tropics to regions of higher latitude.  How does this process serve to balance Earth’s climate, and how is it related to the hydrologic cycle?

6.    What are the benefits and potentially disastrous consequences of hurricane strikes, including non-weather events?

7.    What are waterborne diseases?  Insect vectors?

8.    Mosquitoes carry a wide range of infectious diseases that can be a threat to human health.  Following hurricanes, mosquitoes can breed in available standing water.  What are some of the diseases that mosquitoes spread in the United States?

9.    What is meant by disaster preparedness?

10. How can Texans best prepare for hurricanes and their aftermath?

Data Research:

Labs: