Introduction to Disasters: Concepts, definitions, disaster classifications including natural and man-made disasters.

Disaster Management

History shows that India is exposed to national disasters. Cyclones, floods, earthquakes, droughts and floods are major threats.
About 60 percent of the landmass is prone to earthquakes of various intensities, over 40 million hectares is prone to floods and 68 percent of the area is susceptible to drought. This not only results in loss to thousands of lives, but also in terms of loss in private, community and public assets.
While substantial scientific and material progress has been made, the loss of lives and property due to disasters has not decreased.
Government of India has now brought about a paradigm shift in its approach to disaster management, from being relief centric to one with greater emphasis on preparedness, prevention and mitigation.
This approach proceeds from the conviction that development cannot be sustained unless disaster mitigation is built into the development process. Another cornerstone of the approach is that mitigation has to be inter- disciplinary spanning across all sectors of development.
Disaster Management occupies an important place in the policy framework as it is the poor and underprivileged who are worst affected on account of calamities and disasters.
Disaster Management is a multi-disciplinary area in which a wide range of issues that range from forecasting, warning, search and rescue, relief, reconstruction and rehabilitation are included. It is multi-sectoral as it involves administrators, scientists, planners, volunteers and communities. Their roles and activities span the pre-disaster, during disaster and post-disaster plans. All these activities are complementary and supplementary to each other and here is a critical need for coordinating these activities.
Natural disasters directly impact economies, agriculture, food security, water, sanitation, environment and health. It is therefore one of the single largest concerns for most of the developing nations.
Apart from the economic aspect, such disasters also have social and psychological dimensions that needs to be studied and appropriate strategies for mitigation developed.
Today, we have a range of early warning systems for a range of natural hazards. However, it is not enough to ensure that communities are safe from disasters. This is where disaster mitigation can play an important role.

What is disaster management?

The United Nations defines a disaster as a serious disruption of the functioning of a community or a society. Disasters involve widespread human, material, economic or environmental impacts, which exceed the ability of the affected community or society to cope using its own resources.
The Red Cross and Red Crescent societies define disaster management as the organisation and management of resources and responsibilities for dealing with all humanitarian aspects of emergencies, in particular preparedness, response and recovery in order to lessen the impact of disasters.

Types of disasters

There is no country that is immune from disaster, though vulnerability to disaster varies. There are four main types of disaster.

Natural disasters: including floods, hurricanes, earthquakes and volcano eruptions that have immediate impacts on human health and secondary impacts causing further death and suffering from (for example) floods, landslides, fires, tsunamis.

Natural Types of Disasters

· Agricultural diseases & pests

· Damaging Winds

· Drought and water shortage

· Earthquakes

· Emergency diseases (pandemic influenza)

· Extreme heat

· Floods and flash floods

· Hail

· Hurricanes and tropical storms

· Landslides & debris flow

· Thunderstorms and lighting

· Tornadoes

· Tsunamis

· Wildfire

· Winter and ice storms

· Sinkholes

Environmental emergencies: including technological or industrial accidents, usually involving the production, use or transportation of hazardous material, and occur where these materials are produced, used or transported, and forest fires caused by humans.
Complex emergencies: involving a break-down of authority, looting and attacks on strategic installations, including conflict situations and war.
Pandemic emergencies: involving a sudden onset of contagious disease that affects health, disrupts services and businesses, brings economic and social costs.

Man-Made and Technological Types of Disasters

· Hazardous materials

· Power service disruption & blackout

· Nuclear power plant and nuclear blast

· Radiological emergencies

· Chemical threat and biological weapons

· Cyber attacks

· Explosion

· Civil unrest

Any disaster can interrupt essential services, such as health care, electricity, water, sewage/garbage removal, transportation and communications.
The interruption can seriously affect the health, social and economic networks of local communities and countries.
Disasters have a major and long-lasting impact on people long after the immediate effect has been mitigated.
Poorly planned relief activities can have a significant negative impact not only on the disaster victims but also on donors and relief agencies. So it is important that physical therapists join established programmes rather than attempting individual efforts.
Local, regional, national and international organisations are all involved in mounting a humanitarian response to disasters. Each will have a prepared disaster management plan. These plans cover prevention, preparedness, relief and recovery

Phases of Disaster

The National Governor’s Association designed a phase of disaster model to help emergency managers prepare for and respond to a disaster, also known as the ‘life cycle’ of comprehensive emergency management.
The four phases of disaster:
- Mitigation
- Preparedness
- Response
- Recovery
The model helps frame issues related to disaster preparedness as well as economic and business recovery after a disaster.
Each phase has particular needs, requires distinct tools, strategies, and resources and faces different challenges.
The issues addressed below relate to the resiliency and recovery of the local economy and business community before and after a major disaster.

MITIGATION

Pre-Disaster Mitigation Efforts

PREPAREDNESS

Education, Outreach and Training

Business Continuity & Emergency Management Planning

RESPONSE

Immediate Response to Stakeholders

Establish Business Recovery Center

RECOVERY

Post-Disaster Economic Recovery Plan

Phases of Disaster

Mitigation

Mitigation involves steps to reduce vulnerability to disaster impacts such as injuries and loss of life and property.
This might involve changes in local building codes to fortify buildings; revised zoning and land use management; strengthening of public infrastructure; and other efforts to make the community more resilient to a catastrophic event.

Preparedness

Preparedness focuses on understanding how a disaster might impact the community and how education, outreach and training can build capacity to respond to and recover from a disaster.
This may include engaging the business community, pre-disaster strategic planning, and other logistical readiness activities.
The disaster preparedness activities guide provides more information on how to better prepare an organization and the business community for a disaster.

Response

Response addresses immediate threats presented by the disaster, including saving lives, meeting humanitarian needs (food, shelter, clothing, public health and safety), cleanup, damage assessment, and the start of resource distribution.
As the response period progresses, focus shifts from dealing with immediate emergency issues to conducting repairs, restoring utilities, establishing operations for public services (including permitting), and finishing the cleanup process.
Triage efforts assess and deal with the most pressing emergency issues. This period is often marked by some level of chaos, which can last a month or more, depending on the nature of the disaster and the extent of damage. Federal resources, such as action from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (in the case of a major disaster declaration) and non-profit resources such as the Red Cross are deployed immediately
Business re-entry into the economy begins during this phase. Businesses initially may face issues with access to their site, preliminary damage assessment, and communications with staff, vendors, suppliers and customers. Ongoing issues may include access to capital and workers, the repair of damaged property or inventory, and a diminished customer base. It is in this phase that long-term future of a region’s business base will be saved or lost.
Business Recovery Centers are quickly set up in a community to centralize small business recovery resources (e.g. SBA, SBDC, SCORE, CDFI, etc), local bank officers, technical assistance providers, and other critical assistance for maintaining business continuity and/or get businesses up and running.
Federal resources from SBA, FEMA, HUD, EDA, USDA, etc., as well as state programs, start to arrive; temporary housing goes up; and the planning for the reconstruction of damaged infrastructure, facilities, and areas begins. The response phase typically continues through the sixth month, again depending on the nature of the disaster.
It is not uncommon for disasters to reveal a weakened economic development landscape, with significant gaps in organizational capacity, staff and resources. Thus, economic development agencies and stakeholders may need additional staff, capacity building assistance, and training.

Recovery

Recovery is the fourth phase of disaster and is the restoration of all aspects of the disaster’s impact on a community and the return of the local economy to some sense of normalcy.
By this time, the impacted region has achieved a degree of physical, environmental, economic and social stability.
The recovery phase of disaster can be broken into two periods. The short-term phase typically lasts from six months to at least one year and involves delivering immediate services to businesses.
The long-term phase, which can range up to decades, requires thoughtful strategic planning and action to address more serious or permanent impacts of a disaster.
Investment in economic development capacity building becomes essential to foster economic diversification, attain new resources, build new partnerships and implement effective recovery strategies and tactics.
Communities must access and deploy a range of public and private resources to enable long-term economic recovery.

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