ABSTRACT
These statements capture common beliefs regarding disaster impact and recovery. The first expresses the widely held view that natural disasters are impartial, indiscriminate forces that potentially impact everyone. This belief that disasters threaten everyone equally because they act in a quirky or haphazard fashion is reinforced by newspaper photographs of houses located next to each other in disaster-ravaged neighborhoods: one is destroyed while the other is relatively unscathed. In the face of such seemingly random outcomes fashioned by powerful natural forces, social factors that affect so much of our everyday lives - such as wealth, race, and ethnicity - are deemed to be of little or no import.
