Hazards, Disasters And Your Community - United Nations ...

hazards and vulnerability meet. See the figure along with underlying issues under each.
There are several important characteristics that make Disasters different from Accidents. The loss of a
sole income earner in a car crash may be a disaster to a family, but only an accident to the community.
Variables such as Causes, Frequency, Duration of the Impact, Speed of Onset, Scope of the Impact,
Destructive Potential, Human Vulnerability etc determine the difference.
WHAT IS VULNERABILITY?
Vulnerability is defined as “The extent to which a community, structure, service, or geographic area is
likely to be damaged or disrupted by the impact of particular hazard, on account of their nature,
construction and proximity to hazardous terrain or a disaster prone area."
Now take for example a house built from cane and thatch and the other a brick building. The house built
from cane and thatch that can be blown in a tropical cyclone are more vulnerable to the wind than a brick
building. A badly constructed brick building is more likely to disintegrate with the violent ground shaking
of an earthquake than cane or thatch hut and is more vulnerable to earthquake hazard. Hence structures
should be built strong enough to resist maximum force exerted by any event or for combination of event.
Such measure will take care of the physical vulnerability.
Social and economic conditions also determine the vulnerability of a society to an extent. It has been
observed that human losses in disasters in developing countries like India tend to be high when
compared to developed countries where material losses predominate.
See the figure where the
settlements are located in
hazardous slopes. Many
landslide and flooding disasters
are linked to what you see in
the figure below. Unchecked
growth of settlements in unsafe
areas exposes the people to the
Unstable slope
river
Site
river
Site after pressures from population growth and urbanization
hazard. In case of an earthquake or landslide the ground may fail and the houses on the top may topple
or slide and affect the settlements at the lower level even if they are designed well for earthquake forces.
WHAT IS RISK?
Risk is a measure of the expected losses (deaths, injuries, property, economic activity etc) due to a
hazard of a particular magnitude occurring in a given area over a specific time period.
“ t o w a r d s s a f e r I N D I A ” 6