Fundamental Theories of Disasters

Fundamental Theories of Disasters

Introduction

Generally, emergency management refers to the application of science, technology, and management to handle the extreme events that can put the lives of a large number of people at risk by damaging property and perturbing community life. Emergency management has taken the shape of specialized field with the growing number of environmental threats. With this, people have now become sensitive towards hazards and catastrophes because of the media attention to the foreseen problems.

In addition, the business sector is paying sufficient attention to the disaster losses, which have significant adverse consequences on planning and performance of any business. Bankruptcy and closure are the severe adverse effects because of the business disaster. All these contributed towards making a disaster management team, who must be professionals, trained in crisis management, and developed a comprehensive plan of crisis management and procedures. For developing any strategy, it is pertinent to understand the different fundamental theories on disaster.

Fundamental Theories of Disaster

According to the experts of natural and social sciences, there are four fundamental theories of disaster. These theories perceive the disasters as:

Acts of God/Fate

Acts of Nature

Joint effects of nature and society

Social constructions

Acts of God/Fate

For millions of years, people have been conceiving disasters coming from spiritual and uncontrollable forces. These forces were believed as unfavorable movements or alignment of stars and planets, or acts of God that were beyond the human understanding. In any of its form, disasters were believed to have been out of the human control. The other belief associated with the disaster was they were celestial vengeance for personal sins and failures. The divine retribution was considered in case of floods, earthquakes, and famine etc. These kinds of attributions were common from west to east and from Greek and Romans to the Chinese civilization at the ...