ABSTRACT
A crisis is categorised as a serious threat to the basic structures or the fundamental values and norms of a social system'. Crises are ill-structured situations in terms of technical, social and cultural contexts. Disaster might result from a natural occurrence, a serious accident, or some kind of criminal or terrorist activity. Borodzizc defines a disaster as a systematic collapse of cultural precautions for dealing with socio-technical phenomena'. Nudell and Antokol define an induced catastrophe as a category of crisis, emergency or disaster that results directly from the intentional activities of individuals or groups. Borodzicz also describes a general category of events which arise out of a lack of congruence between management processes associated with operational or technological systems, and with human and information systems within their context of the social architecture. Curtin et al suggest that some crises may be exacerbated or even created for their own purposes by pressure groups or by the media.
