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For other uses, see Disaster (disambiguation).
A disaster (from Middle French désastre, from Old Italian disastro, from the Greek pejorative prefix dis- bad + aster star) is the impact of a natural or man-made hazard that negatively affects society or environment. The word disaster\'s root is from astrology: this implies that when the stars are in a bad position a bad event will happen.
In contemporary academia, disasters are seen as the effect of hazards on vulnerable areas. Hazards that occur in areas with low vulnerability are not considered a disaster, as is the case in uninhabited regions (Quarantelli 1998).
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Wisner et al (2004) reflect a common opinion when they argue that all disasters can be seen as being man-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. The risk can also depend on the nature of the hazard itself, ranging from lightning strikes, which threatens a very small area, to risks to civilization, humans and planet Earth, which have the potential to end civilization.
A natural disaster is the consequence of when a potential natural hazard (e.g., volcanic eruption, earthquake, landslide, tsunami) becomes a physical event and this event affects humans. Human vulnerability, caused by the lack of planning, lack of appropriate emergency management, leads to financial, structural, and human impact. The resulting loss depends on the capacity of the population to support or resist the disaster: their resilience. This understanding is concentrated in the formulation: "disasters occur when hazards meet vulnerability". A natural hazard will hence never result in a natural disaster in areas without vulnerability, e.g., strong earthquakes in uninhabited areas. The term natural has consequently been disputed because the events simply are not hazards or disasters without human involvement.
Disasters having an element of human interests, negligence, error, or involving the failure of a system are called man-made disasters. Man-made hazards are in turn categorized as technological or sociological. Technological hazards are results of failure of technology, such as engineering failures, transport accidents or environmental disasters. Sociological hazards have a strong human motive, such as criminal acts, stampedes, riots and war.
The probability of avoiding a disaster is greatly improved when those potentially affected by them implement mitigative action and develop emergency preparedness plans. The science of disaster management deals with this issue. Although the term disaster is subjective, it is often used in the developed world to refer to situations where local emergency management resources are inadequate to counteract the negative effects of the event (Quarantelli 1998). Business continuity planning focus on the particular application of disaster management in the commercial domain.
Wikibooks\' [[wikibooks:|]] has more about this subject:
Historical Disasters and Tragedies
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