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.

The Word Dectective describes disaster's etymology as originating “from two Latin elements: "dis," meaning "away," "wrong" or "not," and "aster," meaning "star."... [so astrologically] when your stars were in a bad position, something really bad, a "disaster," was bound to happen."

Disasters may be called different things depending upon the context. Here are common alternative terms and contextual uses:

business interruption – Information Security specialists use this phrase to denote an event that affect normal business operations.
catastrophe – Insurance specialists use this phrase to denote a disaster beyond actuarial expectations.
crisis – Disaster Management and Information Security specialists use this phrase to denote an event that requires activation of Crisis Management organizations.
disruption – Information Security specialists use this phrase to denote a disaster that interrupts normal business or technical processes.
event – Disaster Management specialists use this phrase as a catch-all for disasters.
outage – This phrase is used by Information Security specialists to denote a service or process failure.

Surviving a disaster

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 consitutes sufficient preparation is highly situational from person to person and location to location.

Personal and family disaster preparation

People and families should make assess the likely threats in their location and prepare emergency supply kits, learn basic first aid and decide 'safe' meeting places. Young children should be trained to:

recognize the warning signs for likely threats
respond safely to different threats
evacuate to a safe place
know their full name
know their parent's full name
know their telephone number
know their address
know the names of their relatives

Emergency supply kits should include the basic items recommended in the links provided below in addition to any special needs like diapers for babies, presribed medicines or glasses for those who need them.

Local government and emergency services disaster preparation and management

Local governments and emergency service organizations maintain disaster response plans to minimize further death and property loss with quick and efficient action. A predetermined command structure containing the functions, names, telephone numbers, and addresses needed for a disaster are used to mobilize local police, fire and medical staff who are in turn, occasionally supported by military forces. The disaster command structure attempts to quickly establish control over a disaster scene to rescue victims, clear casualties and where possible, subdue the threat. Governments may also provide basic humanitarian assistance.

Business disaster preparation and management

To minimize losses and the death or injury of staff, businesses can create a business continuity plan and restore key business functions quickly. Like local government, business should maintain a predetermined command structure in addition to the steps required to restore data and resume business operations.

Businesses also must consider non-traditional threats like liquidity shortages, public relations, power outage and telecommunication outage as a part of their plans.

National disaster preparation

National governments maintain disaster response plans to support local governments and to isolate an event's effects to a localized area. A predetermined command structure which may include specialized agencies like the United States Federal Emergency Management Agency aids disaster relief and support of the local governments and emergency services.

National governments also may assess events to ensure the impact remains localized. Naturally occuring disesase, biological terrorism, and crop blights are examples of events that may be containable to a small area.

Since nations have direct command control over miliatary forces, they may choose to deploy personnel as requested or needed to assist in rescue, treatment of victims, humanitarian aid, and the maintaining of civil order. Generally speaking, national governments can coordinate the deployment of emergency services personnel from unaffected areas to reduce the administrative burden on local command structures. Also, national governments generally have more resources and funds to assist local governments with relief efforts.

Humanitarian disaster preparation

For larger disasters that overwhelm the affected goverments, international non-governmental humanitarian agencies may mobilize to water, feed, house and treat disaster victims. Humanitarian aid may also include longterm recovery and rebuilding efforts.

Information security disaster preparation

Adherance to accepted information security principals require disaster recovery plans. A disaster is the start of a 'crisis' where predefined crisis management plans activate. During the development of the crisis management plan, minimum thresholds are established against which a disaster's effect can be compared. Once a disaster sufficiently interrupts key functions and processes, recovery activities can be intiated to control expectancy loss.

Natural disasters

Natural disasters arise without direct human involvement, either by intent or accident, however the event may be exacerbated by human actions prior, during or after the incident. Also, one specific event may spawn another type of disaster. For example, a hurricane may cause flooding by excessive rain or by pulling seawater onshore, also called a storm surge. A volcanic eruption is particularly prone to spawning additional events like earthquakes, structural fires and wildfires, flooding from melting of mountain snow and ice, landslides, mudflows, thunderstorms and, if the volcano is located in or near the ocean, tsunami.

Avalanche
Cold in excess
Disease
Drought
Earthquake
Fire
Flood
Food supply interruption or contamination
Hail
Heat in excess
Hurricane also called typhoon or cyclone
Landslide
Mudflow
Sink hole
Storm surge
Thunderstorm
Tornado
Tsunami
Volcano
Waterspout
Wildfire
Winter storm

Man-made disasters

Disasters having an element of human intent or negligence are called man-made disasters. A natural disaster may cause some of the following events as a secondary disaster, however, in isolation these events are considered man-made.

External links