Disaster

For other uses, see Disaster (disambiguation).

Ruins from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, remembered as one of the worst natural disasters in United States history

A disaster is a serious disruption of the functioning of a community or a society involving widespread human, material, economic or environmental losses and impacts, which exceeds the ability of the affected community or society to cope using its own resources.

In contemporary academia, disasters are seen as the consequence of inappropriately managed risk. These risks are the product of a combination of both hazards and vulnerability. Hazards that strike in areas with low vulnerability will never become disasters, as is the case in uninhabited regions.

Developing countries suffer the greatest costs when a disaster hits – more than 95 percent of all deaths caused by hazards occur in developing countries, and losses due to natural hazards are 20 times greater (as a percentage of GDP) in developing countries than in industrialized countries.

Etymology

The word disaster is derived from Middle French désastre and that from Old Italian disastro, which in turn comes from the Ancient Greek pejorative prefix δυσ-, (dus-) "bad" and ἀστήρ (aster), "star". The root of the word disaster ("bad star" in Greek) comes from an astrological sense of a calamity blamed on the position of planets.

Classifications

Researchers have been studying disasters for more than a century, and for more than forty years disaster research. The studies reflect a common opinion when they argue that all disasters can be seen as being human-made, their reasoning being that human actions before the strike of the hazard can prevent it developing into a disaster. All disasters are hence the result of human failure to introduce appropriate disaster management measures. Hazards are routinely divided into natural or human-made, although complex disasters, where there is no single root cause, are more common in developing countries. A specific disaster may spawn a secondary disaster that increases the impact. A classic example is an earthquake that causes a tsunami, resulting in coastal flooding.

Natural hazard

Main article: Natural hazard

A natural hazard is a natural process or phenomenon that may cause loss of life, injury or other health impacts, property damage, loss of livelihoods and services, social and economic disruption, or environmental damage.

Various phenomena like earthquakes, landslides, volcanic eruptions, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, blizzards, tsunamis, and cyclones are all natural hazards that kill thousands of people and destroy billions of dollars of habitat and property each year. However, the rapid growth of the world's population and its increased concentration often in hazardous environments has escalated both the frequency and severity of disasters. With the tropical climate and unstable land forms, coupled with deforestation, unplanned growth proliferation, non-engineered constructions which make the disaster-prone areas more vulnerable, tardy communication, and poor or no budgetary allocation for disaster prevention, developing countries suffer more or less chronically from natural disasters. Asia tops the list of casualties caused by natural hazards.

Airplane crashes and terrorist attacks are examples of man-made disasters: they cause pollution, kill people, and damage property. This example is the September 11 attacks in 2001 at the World Trade Center in New York.

Human-instigated disasters

Main article: Man-made disasters

Human-instigated disasters are the consequence of technological hazards. Examples include stampedes, fires, transport accidents, industrial accidents, oil spills and nuclear explosions/radiation. War and deliberate attacks may also be put in this category. As with natural hazards, man-made hazards are events that have not happened—for instance, terrorism. Man-made disasters are examples of specific cases where man-made hazards have become reality in an event.

See also

• Act of God
• List of accidents and disasters by death toll
• Civil protection
• Crisis
• Disaster medicine
• Disaster convergence
• Disaster response
• Disaster recovery
• Disaster area
• Disaster research
• Disaster recovery plan
• Disaster recovery and business continuity auditing
• Disaster opportunism
• Disaster Mitigation Act of 2000
• Hazard
• Emergency
• Emergency management
• Environmental emergency
• Human extinction
• List of disasters
• List of disasters by cost
• Maritime disasters
• Risk governance
• Risk
• Risks to civilization, humans and planet Earth
• Sociology of disaster
• Survivalism
• The Klaxon.com
• Disaster film
• List of military disasters
• List of railway disasters

Further reading

• Barton, Allen H. Communities in Disaster: A Sociological Analysis of Collective Stress Situations, Doubleday, 1st edition 1969, ASIN: B0006BVVOW
• Susanna M. Hoffman, Susanna M. & Anthony Oliver-Smith, authors & editors. Catastrophe and Culture: The Anthropology of Disaster, School of American Research Press, 1st edition 2002, ISBN 978-1930618152
• Bankoff, Greg, Georg Frerks, Dorothea Hilhorst. Mapping Vulnerability: Disasters, Development and People, Routledge, 2004, ISBN 978-1853839641
• Alexander, David. Principles of Emergency planning and Management, Oxford University Press, 1 edition 2002, ISBN 978-0195218381
• Quarantelli, E. L. (2008). “Conventional Beliefs and Counterintuitive Realities”. Conventional Beliefs and Counterintuitive Realities in Social Research: an international Quarterly of the social Sciences, Vol. 75 (3): 873–904.
• Paul, B. K et al. (2003). “Public Response to Tornado Warnings: a comparative Study of the May 04, 2003 Tornadoes in Kansas, Missouri and Tennessee”. Quick Response Research Report, no 165, Natural Hazard Center, Universidad of Colorado
• Kahneman, D. y Tversky, A. (1984). “Choices, Values and frames”. American Psychologist 39 (4): 341–350.
• Beck, U. (2006). Risk Society, towards a new modernity. Buenos Aires, Paidos
• Aguirre, B. E & Quarantelli, E. H. (2008). “Phenomenology of Death Counts in Disasters: the invisible dead in the 9/11 WTC attack”. International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters. Vol. 26 (1): 19–39.
• Wilson, H. (2010). “Divine Sovereignty and The Global Climate Change debate”. Essays in Philosophy. Vol. 11 (1): 1–7
• Uscher-Pines, L. (2009). “Health effects of Relocation following disasters: a systematic review of literature”. Disasters. Vol. 33 (1): 1–22.
• Scheper-Hughes, N. (2005). “Katrina: the disaster and its doubles”. Anthropology Today. Vol. 21 (6).
• Phillips, B. D. (2005). “Disaster as a Discipline: The Status of Emergency Management Education in the US”. International Journal of Mass-Emergencies and Disasters. Vol. 23 (1): 111–140.
• Mileti, D. and Fitzpatrick, C. (1992). “The causal sequence of Risk communication in the Parkfield Earthquake Prediction experiment”. Risk Analysis. Vol. 12: 393–400.
• Korstanje, M. (2011). "The Scientific Sensationalism: short commentaries along with scientific risk perception". E Journalist. Volume 10, Issue 2.
• Korstanje, Maximiliano E. "Swine Flu in Buenos Aires: Beyond the Principle of Resilience", International Journal of Disaster Resilience in the Built Environment, Vol. 2, Issue #1, 2001, pp. 59–73
• Perkins, Jamey. "The Calamity of Disaster - Recognizing the possibilities, planning for the event, managing crisis and coping with the effects", Public Safety Degrees

External links

• The Disaster Roundtable of the National Academy of Sciences
• EM-DAT International Disaster Database of the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters
• Global Disaster Alert and Coordination System - The Global Disaster Alert and Coordination System is a joint initiative of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and the European Commission
• UN-SPIDER - UN-SPIDER, the United Nations Programme for Space-based Information for Disaster Management and Emergency Response], a project of the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA)