ABSTRACT
The United Nations defines a disaster as a "serious disruption to the functioning of a community or a society". Disasters are events that cause widespread and negative human, material, economic, or environmental issues. Disaster management (DM) has gained major importance for Production and Operations Management (POM) due to the global media spotlight that now illuminates extensive tragedies and informs the world about the countless numbers of human lives lost or at risk. If human-made disasters are added to the consideration, then the results become horrendous. For example, it is estimated that 50 million people died as a result of World War II alone. Managing disasters is an intense undertaking, so much so that disaster professionals cannot carry the task of achieving disaster recovery ability alone and thus the DM load needs to be a shared responsibility across society. DM typologies attempt to classify disasters according to their probability of occurrence, their geographic scope, emergence pattern, spread rate, and impact.
