ABSTRACT
Disasters are no respecters of countries, living standards or state capacity; they strike with impunity at rich and poor, at prepared and unprepared, alike. They are frequent and numerous. The Emergency Events Database (n.d.), a product of the Belgium-based Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED), has listed thousands of disasters over the past century. During only the past decade our memories are sparked by the names Hurricane Katrina (2005, New Orleans, USA), Cyclone Nargis (2008, Myanmar), and the Indian Ocean tsunami (2004, Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, India), to mention some of the most destructive. The earthquakes in Chile and Haiti in 2010 may still be fresh in our memories, but we should not forget the earthquake in Sichuan Province in China in 2008 that left approximately 70,000 dead. Altogether, hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost in these disasters; tens of millions more have had their lives significantly disrupted.
