Legal Dictionary

disaster

Definition of disaster

Etymology

    From Italian disastro, disaster; originally meaning "unfavourable to one's stars", from dis-, bad (compare dys-), + astro, star, celestial body, from Latin astrum, from Greek astron.

Pronunciation

Noun

disaster (plural disasters)

  1. An unexpected natural or man-made catastrophe of substantial extent causing significant physical damage or destruction, loss of life or sometimes permanent change to the natural environment.
  2. An unforeseen event causing great loss, upset or unpleasantness of whatever kind.

    The downpour and gales turned the wedding into a disaster.

Further reading

A disaster is the tragedy of a natural or human-made hazard (a hazard is a situation which poses a level of threat to life, health, property, or environment) that negatively affects society or environment.

In contemporary academia, disasters are seen as the consequence of inappropriately managed risk. These risks are the product of hazards and vulnerability. Hazards that strike in areas with low vulnerability are not considered a disaster, as is the case in uninhabited regions.

Developing countries suffer the greatest costs when a disaster hits - more than 95 percent of all deaths caused by disasters occur in developing countries, and losses due to natural disasters are 20 times greater (as a percentage of GDP) in developing countries than in industrialized countries.

A disaster can be defined as any tragic event with great loss stemming from events such as earthquakes, floods, catastrophic accidents, fires, or explosions.

References:

  1. Wiktionary. Published under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.



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