Disaster Management

A disaster is not an event that would allow you to prepare yourself for it before its arrival. Recovering from its aftermath can take weeks, months, years, and in some rare cases, decades. From a volcano to a gas chamber leak, the range of disasters lurking in the environment is more than you can count.

However, that doesn’t mean that you would give up and accept defeat. As someone rightfully said, “precaution is better than cure”, the only way to survive these disasters is to learn how to manage them. Today, we are going to explore exactly just that. We are going to take a close look at the basic structure of disaster management so that we can prepare ourselves better when faced with an adversary.

What is a Disaster?

In order to understand the essence of disaster management, you need to learn what disaster means. So, let’s deal with this part first.

A disaster is a serious damage or disruption of the functioning of a society or community. It involves a widespread impact on humans, the economy, and the environment to a degree that exceeds the ability of the society to recover from.

It takes place when a hazard becomes so severe that it adversely impacts the lives of vulnerable people. The lethal combination of vulnerability, hazards, and the inability to decrease the potentially harmful consequences of risk results in the formation of a disaster.

What do you mean by Disaster Management?

Disaster management can be defined as the management and organization of responsibilities and available resources for coping up with various humanitarian aspects of emergencies. It focuses on the response, preparedness, and recovery so that the impact of the disaster is lessened as much as possible.

Essentially, it is a series of strategic planning of the various procedures that need to be undertaken, administered, and employed to safeguard assets and lives from severe damages when natural or man-made calamities take place.

Why is Disaster Management Important?

Disasters can drastically impact the environment and the life forms living in it in a highly negative way. It is impossible to avoid disasters, especially natural ones. They are inevitable and there is nothing you can do to stop them from happening. However, the most that we can do is to prepare ourselves better to face the challenges brought up by a disaster.  This is why learning how to manage a disaster (which is the crux of disaster management) is so important.

Disaster management needs intervention and assistance from the government and the human community at large. Proper planning alongside adequate funds is what is going to make the process of execution successful.

When a disaster occurs, there is widespread panic.  Thinking clearly and planning properly when you are panic-ridden is not possible. Therefore, when you have a pre-established rulebook to follow (which is created at leisure with calm, cool, and collected mind), then chances of its success are much higher. This is why it is included in the curriculum of students these days.

What are the Types of Disaster?

A disaster can be of various types and the duration can last range from a few seconds to a couple of years. Here is a broad classification of the types of disasters:

Natural Disaster

A natural disaster is a physical phenomenon that is caused by either slow or rapid succession of events that immediately impacts human health and leads to widespread suffering and death. For instance, an earthquake can take place for a few seconds whereas a drought takes a lot of time to develop, but both can adversely affect various life forms in abundance.

Some of the common examples of natural disasters are as follows:

• Geophysical (such as tsunamis, earthquakes, volcanic activity, and landslides)
• Meteorological (such as storms, wave surges, and cyclones)
• Hydrological (such as floods and avalanches)
• Biological (such as disease epidemics and insect/animal plagues)
• Climatological (such as wildfire, drought, and extreme temperatures)

Man-Made Disaster

Man-made disasters are events that are the direct results of human activities or mistakes. Sometimes, it is the result of an immediate action made by humans while sometimes it is a build-up of the culmination of human misdoings.

Some of the most common man-made disasters are as follows:

• Groundwater contamination
• Mining accidents
• Structure failures
• Hazardous material spills
• Gas chamber leaks
• Oil spills
• Vehicle accident
• Environmental degradation
• Pollution
• Terrorism

Pandemic Disasters

The word pandemic has been derived from the Greek words ‘pan’ meaning ‘all’ and ‘demos meaning ‘people’. So, pandemic means a situation that affects everyone. It is the spread of an infectious disease that spreads across a large region that not only affects health but also disrupts services that lead to economical degradation.

It may be a consequence of a natural or man-made disaster or both. Some of the common examples of pandemic disasters are as follows:

• Cholera
• Spanish Flu
• Avian Flu/ Bird Flu
• Zika
• Ebola
• Malaria
• Dengue
• Yellow Fever
• Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19)

Complex Emergency Disasters

Complex emergency disasters refer to those events that result from a combination of both natural and man-made causes that involve looting, attacks, breakdown of authority, conflicts, and war. These disasters are often characterized by widespread damage to both economics and science, and extensive violence, among others.

It requires humanitarian assistance at a large scale across numerous agencies in order to combat these disasters. There is also an increased risk of security for humanitarian relief workers in these cases. Some of the prime examples of complex emergency disasters are as follows:

• Armed conflicts
• Epidemics
• Food insecurity
• Displaced populations

What are Different Phases of Disaster Management?

The key to formulating a successful plan for managing disaster involves breaking down the whole action into different fragments since that would help in the easy execution. This is why the phases of disaster management are categorized in the following four phases. The government and society have to function as one organization here.

Mitigation

This phase takes place before the disaster takes place. Different people should be assigned to different work in different phases and each phase should be handled separately. A clear understanding of all four phases will help empower the overall disaster management plan.

It will give you the best chance at survival and recovery. This is done in order to protect people and property. It involves property inspection and discovering various ways to minimize damage. The primary goal of this step is to decrease the vulnerability to disaster impacts.

Preparedness

This refers to the actions taken ahead of time so that one can prepare for an emergency. Herein, attempts are made to understand how a particular disaster can affect life forms and to what degree. This phase involves training, educations, and developing skills to face the disaster.

Response

The third phase in disaster management is response. It is primarily focused on protecting the people and property during the time of the disaster. It entails the immediate aftermath of a disaster. The attention is paid towards the immediate threats. Plans are executed to keep life forms out of harm’s way.

Recovery

The fourth and final phase of disaster management is recovery. Immediately after the response phase, there will be a gradual shift towards conducting repairs, re-establishing operations, restoring utilities, and overall cleaning up. This is generally conducted when some form of environmental, physical, social, and economic stability has been achieved.

A major focus here is to obtain new resources while implementing effective pre-established recovery strategies.

Depending upon the severity of the disaster, it can take around six months to one year or even longer for completing the recovery phase.

What are the Disaster Management Best Practices?

Managing through a disaster requires the execution of the following three practices:

• Frequently update the disaster management recovery plan while laying down instructions specifically. Technological advances are being made every day. Therefore, including new plans or tweaking the existing plans to best suit the needs are crucial.
• Regularly test your disaster recovery plan so that you can understand whether the plans are feasible or not. Try to do it annually at least.
• Be sure to have a clear line of communication. This is extremely important. Communicating and listening to each other’s opinions and formulating the best plan based on everyone’s input will make the operation successful. During and immediately after the disaster, lines of communication may be interrupted or broken. So, keep this in mind and keep some back-up plans in hand in case people are not able to communicate.

Conclusion

Disaster management is based on the principle of planning hard today to safeguard the future. Even though we can get early warnings of disaster these days, no one should be complacent and take it for granted. There will be many times when we won’t be warned about an upcoming disaster or there will be times when the intensity of an upcoming disaster is undermined. Therefore, planning is the only thing that will keep you safe.