{"id":358,"date":"2024-05-06T14:27:54","date_gmt":"2024-05-06T18:27:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/thedisasterlab\/?p=358"},"modified":"2025-08-27T11:43:37","modified_gmt":"2025-08-27T15:43:37","slug":"what-is-a-disaster","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/thedisasterlab\/2024\/what-is-a-disaster\/","title":{"rendered":"What is a Disaster?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\n What is a Disaster?\n <\/h1>\n \n \n <\/header>\n\n <\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n<\/section>\n\n\n\n
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At a recent Disaster Lab meeting, the question of \u201cwhat is a disaster?\u201d came up. We realized that despite researching how other people were thinking about, addressing, and\/or experiencing disasters our project team had yet to define the term for our own purposes. As we set about doing so, we recognized that (as is the case with so many projects) our sense of what constitutes a disaster has become more subjective and relational the more that we learn about the ways in which communities have experienced disasters and displacement historically.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Oxford English Dictionary<\/em> defines a disaster as \u201cAn event or occurrence of a ruinous or very distressing nature; a calamity; esp. a sudden accident or natural catastrophe that causes great damage or loss of life.\u201d This is a tidy definition that seemingly captures the essence of what constitutes a disaster; something unexpected, something upsetting and potentially life-altering or life-ending, and something beyond any one victim\u2019s control.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, this tidy definition fails to reveal the many ways in which the notion of a disaster is contested because there is so much at stake. To name something a disaster is to call attention to its tragic proportions, either human, material, or environmental. We see this in the language around climate change, which has shifted from emergency, to disaster, and now catastrophe<\/a>, or apocalypse. Returning to the Oxford English Dictionary<\/em>, it bears observing that the definition offered of a catastrophe relies on an understanding of the term disaster, explaining that it is \u201ca sudden disaster, very wide-spread, fatal, or signal.\u201d The dictionary also notes that \u201cIn the application of exaggerated language to misfortunes it is used very loosely.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Crucially, the terms disaster and catastrophe have been used interchangeably in recent scholarship, drawing attention to what is at stake in the research and public discourse on this topic. For instance, historian Julia F. Irwin, in Catastrophic Diplomacy: US Foreign Disaster Assistance in the American Century <\/em><\/a> (University of North Carolina Press, 2024) uses both \u201cdisaster\u201d and \u201ccatastrophe\u201d to describe how “in the early 1900s, US diplomatic and military officials began devoting increased attention to catastrophes<\/strong> in other nations and empires. At the same time, they started to contribute rising material and financial resources to the survivors of these disasters<\/strong>, grasping the strategic, diplomatic, economic, and moral potential of American humanitarian assistance.\u201d (emphasis added, 2)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In other cases, scholars have focused on defining the term disaster alone. For instance, in Inventing Disaster: The Culture of Calamity from the Jamestown Colony to the Johnstown Flood<\/em><\/a>, <\/em>Cynthia Kierner insists that disasters are \u201crecognizably modern\u201d (xii), that can be defined in both quantitative and qualitative ways. Kierner notes that disasters \u201cinvolve collective or community suffering and not merely individual losses\u201d and suggests a disaster is \u201cless an event\u201d than \u201ca process that unfolds in its particular social and cultural context, exposing social fissures and tensions that engender robust and often revealing public debates and conflicts.\u201d (1)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The work of defining disasters federally in Canada falls under Public Safety Canada and its various Emergency Preparedness frameworks (the most recent one dates to 2017 and is currently being revised). This framework<\/a> defines a disaster as:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cEssentially a social phenomenon that results when a hazard intersects with a vulnerable community in a way that exceeds or overwhelms the community\u2019s ability to cope and may cause serious harm to the safety, health, welfare, property or environment of people; may be triggered by a naturally occurring phenomenon which has its origins within the geophysical or biological environment or by human action or error, whether malicious or unintentional, including technological failures, accidents and terrorist acts.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In compiling the Canadian Disaster Database<\/a>, Public Safety Canada includes events and incidents conforming to this definition and which also meet the following criteria:<\/p>\n\n\n\n