Classes of Disasters

As you might suspect, individual responses can be quite different from organizational responses, partly because of perceptions of responsibility (i.e., people may believe it is the responsibility of government, the Red Cross, the U.N., etc. to plan for disasters, and take little individual responsibility of initiative) and effectiveness (i.e., people may believe that there is little they can do to plan for or respond to disasters). However, individuals do take a whole series of actions that reflect their plans for or their failure to plan for disasters, ranging from purchasing insurance and putting together emergency kits to installing alarms, making plans for what to do in case of fires, floods, etc., to searching out information about how to respond to disasters, and it is useful to understand what people do and why when thinking about and preparing for potential disasters.

It is important to distinguish between different classes of disasters, because it is extremely unlikely that any individual (or any organization) will plan for all possible disaster events. For the purposes of this lesson, it is useful to sort disasters into three categories:

• Predictable – e.g., hurricanes, earthquakes, wildfires in areas where these are relatively frequent or common experiences
• Predicted – e.g., terrorism, war, volcanic eruption, and other events that might be predicted to occur, but that do not follow any clear historical pattern (meaning that the predictions might or might not be true)
• Unforseen - e.g., the December 26, 2004 tsunami, 9/11