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Home Tips > Useful > Disaster What Is A Disaster? A disaster is a natural or man-made event that negatively affects life, property, livelihood or industry often resulting in permanent changes to human societies, ecosystems and environment. Disasters manifest as hazards exacerbating vulnerable conditions and exceeding individuals' and communities' means to survive and thrive.
A disaster may be categorized in a number of ways. The distinction that is most widely used is between man-made and natural disasters.
Many disasters are sudden: there is little or no prior warning. An earthquake is currently almost impossible to predict with sufficient accuracy to give a warning. Other disasters may occur more gradually, such as a famine or drought. At an extreme, a disaster may be chronic in nature. The AIDS epidemic in Africa, which has affected millions of people, is a disaster with no end in sight. Often this may obscure the fact that the situation is indeed a disaster, delaying action or bringing a sense of fatalism.
Disasters may also vary in terms of their spatial extent. A tornado is likely to be fairly local in its effects. Floods and earthquakes may be regional in their impact. Other disasters may be national or even international in reach – epidemics are very likely to fall into this category. Arguably, ‘disasters’ may also be ‘sectoral’ or ‘segmental’ in their scope – affecting particular groups, castes, industries and so forth rather than being geographically based. Some would consider ethnic persecution to be a form of disaster, others would classify the collapse of an industry to be disastrous. Thirty years on, this categorization remains influential.
A Natural phenomenon can easily turn into a natural disaster. Appearing to arise without direct human involvement, natural disasters are sometimes called an act of God. A natural disaster may become more severe because of human actions prior, during or after the disaster itself. A specific disaster may spawn different types of events and may reduce the survivability of the initial event. A classic example, is an earthquake that collapses homes, trapping people and breaking gas mains that then ignite, and burn people alive while trapped under debris. Human activity in risk areas may cause natural disasters. Volcanos are particularly prone to causing other events like fires, lahars, mudflows, landslides, earthquakes, and tsunamis.
The following is a list of natural disaster: Avalanche, Cold, Disease, Drought, Earthquake, Fire, Famine, Flood, Hail, Heat, Hurricane, Impact event, Limnic eruption, Landslide, Mudslide, Sink hole, Solar flare, Storm surge, Thunderstorm, Tornado, Tsunami, Volcanic eruption, Waterspout, and Winter storm.
Disasters having an element of human intent, negligence, error or involve a failure of a system are called man-made disasters. Man-made disasters like power or telecommunication outages may be caused by thunderstorms, tornados or earthquakes and though the root cause is an act of God, they are considered a man-made disaster. The power grid and telecommunication infrastructure could be made more resilient against outages however, probably due to cost and feasibility constraints, the systems were intentionally left vulnerable to outage.
Additional man-made disasters include: Arson, Chemical Biological Radiological Nuclear, Civil disorder, Crime, Data loss, Dam failure, Hazardous materials, Processing interruption, Liquidity shortage, Power outage, Public relations crisis, Radiation Contamination, Telecommunication outage, Terrorism, and War.
Chances of survival after a disaster is greatly improved when people, local governments and emergency services, businesses and national governments prepare survival plans and assemble survival gear beforehand. What constitutes sufficient preparation is highly dependent on the location and the disasters that are likely to occur in the area.
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