The Wind Hazard Damage Assessment team will be developing a media intensive blog of the damage survey, so it is important that those on damage assessments catalogue the date, time, and update website users on events and details of deployment trip.
Include answers to who, what, where, when, why, and how type questions about the entire process. Provide someone who is unfamiliar with our work with a detail description of what we are doing; share the experience with them, using impactful anecdotes, photos, or information. Include mundane details (i.e. equipment failure), show scenes of locations visited if available. Who did you meet during the deployment?
Be prepared to document peripheral damage approaching damage site. Pay attention to community response to disaster and the people reacting to damage and structural damage. Record your firsthand experience as you witness the damage for the first time. Take photos of the damage but also photos of the team members examining damage.
Example of blog entry: Third Day of Surveying (29 May 2013): Today we traced our steps back to the houses which experienced either the most damaged or had the most unique failure mechanisms. We drove down S.E. 4th street in the region near Highland East Jr. High School, one of the schools spared in the tornado. The homes adjacent to the school experienced substantial roof damage and some were even leveled. On the other side of the street there seemed to be no damage at all. We entered a community near Briarwood elementary school, a school badly hit by the tornado. A local resident and mathematician at Oklahoma University explained that “The landscape changes on a daily basis.”
