ABSTRACT
Disasters are interesting because they tell us something about human behavior. The disaster calls upon communities to respond, and exploring these community responses provides information about how a community functions, treats outsiders, and rises to new challenges. Community responses also inform us about culture, the habitual ways of doing things, and the meaning ascribed to these patterns of action, about what is ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ behavior in a given community, and of how this can be stretched to its outer limits by the circumstances.
