“Disaster” derives from the Latin “dis” and “aster” meaning “apart” and “star.” The current use of the word reflects the notion of an unlucky star and is “anything that befalls of ruinous or distressing nature; a sudden or great misfortune, mishap, or misadventure; a calamity.” Disasters are events that we define by their distressing nature; that is, by their costs to us and to our community. No other definition focuses on the outcome of what concerns us most—our losses as individuals and as a community. Disasters regardless of how they come about, through natural hazards, technological accidents, military action, or terrorists activities are undesirable and if it were in our power, we would eliminate them. What concerns and preoccupies us as a profession, what we do, has something to do with disasters.
What we do when we manage events is to control or manipulate circumstances so that we can reduce the effects of disasters. Only since the enlightenment have we come to believe that we can manage the conditions leading to disasters; that we can actually prevail over the forces we once attributed to vengeful powers beyond our control. Within our powers now are the abilities to reduce our vulnerabilities, to develop increasingly advanced detection systems to forewarn us of the possibility of disasters, and to prepare for and to develop expertise in responding to stressful events.
Since disasters are defined by their costs in human suffering, a cost driver model is an accurate way of framing how we think about disasters. Disaster Management is the only term that captures the full range of meaning in what we do in security and natural hazard events. By including threat assessment, vulnerability, detection, and action, Disaster Management is comprehensive—it covers all the cost drivers affecting the magnitude of a disaster; it is reflective of our core objective—to reduce or minimize disaster costs; and it is descriptive of our activity—control or management of cost driver properties within our power.
Having a substantive definition sharpens our mission and guides our actions. Moreover, having a clear definition of what we do is a prerequisite for coalescing our work into a profession and, eventually, into a discipline. The disaster management profession is composed of those occupations that need to maintain high states of readiness and whose tasks are to manage events that are extra-ordinary, and therefore costly. To achieve our primary objective of reducing costs (monetary and non-monetary) of disasters, the definition of what we do therefore is to improve effectiveness in the disaster management system using a comprehensive approach with our efforts. And because the definition of what we do is disaster management, we should call what we do Disaster Management.
Posted by Jim Porto 