ABSTRACT
Disasters are not just meteorological or geo-thermal events. Implicit in the term is the perceived impact of these events in human as well as environmental terms. Gist and Lubin (1989) define disaster as “collective stress situations that . . . involve some degree of loss, interfere with the ongoing social life of a community, and are subject to human management.” While the physical force and scale of an earthquake, for example, can be measured on the Richter scale, it is the scale of its destructive force on the built and natural environments and its toll on human life that generally define it as a disaster. Moreover, the “felt” impact and consequence of these events occurs at a variety of levels – on individuals, families, communities, and countries, even globally. As such, disasters may also be seen as social phenomena, or more precisely, as the interaction of natural hazards with social structures and political communities (Drabek, 1986; Dynes et al., 1987; Dynes, 1998; Enarson and Morrow, 1998).
