Disaster Questions
What counts as a disaster?
Disaster has four definitions on dictionary (OED 2020, “Disaster”)
- a) An 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. b) The state or condition that results from a ruinous event; the occurrence of a sudden accident or catastrophe, or a series of such events; misfortune, calamity.
- Astrology. An unfavourable aspect or condition of a star or planet; an ill-omened star. Now historical and rare.
- A physical ailment or disorder. Also as a mass noun. Obsolete.
- In weakened sense. a) An event or fact that has unfortunate consequences. b) A highly unsuccessful or disappointing thing or person; a failure.
We can understand the following definitions to have incorporated four aspects of “disaster”– nature (cause), history (origin), emotion (conception), and consequence (impact). However, these four aspects don’t always coincide. Sometimes, lacking one of the key aspects makes an incident less disastrous. Take two demolitions of the Walker Hall in Amherst College as an example. Walker Hall was demolished twice: firstly, a tragic fire that gutted most parts of the building and its archived administrative records on the night of March 28, 1882; then, a less tragic, college-planned razing to make the way for the current Robert Frost Library in 1963. If we strictly follow definition 1 and ignore 4, we can understand both to be equally disastrous– according to 1 a), they both “cause great damage”. However, if to follow definition 4 and ignore 1, we would only consider the first demolition to be a disaster as it yielded “unfortunate consequences”, whereas the second demolition yielded “fortunate consequences” because a new building was being built.
Disaster takes many shapes and forms. The scope to which the word “disaster” can describe seems as infinite as the number of disasters one experiences throughout a lifetime. Each of us has our own defined set of “disaster”, but a disaster in a digital humanist’s point of view isn’t a union of the multiple sets people define on their own. Besides selecting incidents that “qualify” for being named disasters. digital humanists are also concerned by whether to group connected incidents as a great disaster or separate them as independent minor disasters. A classic example is the disasters havoced by racial supremacists, especially the KKK, in the civil rights demonstrations in the 1960s. Should we group their actions together as a continuously influential disaster or treat each incident as having a unique attribute to their nature or consequence?
In this project, we define a disaster as a union of definition 1 and 4 in the OED, that is, an incident or a string of similar incidents that cause damage to the college community as a whole (including but not limited to property destruction, psychological trauma, forced constraints) and/or that impose negative consequences, intended or not.
Disaster, Catastrophe, Calamity, and Tragedy
How would one differentiate disaster from catastrophe, calamity, or tragedy? In intuition, we use them interchangeably. Their subtle differences are still subject to debate.
Catastrophe is denoted as an event producing a subversion of the order or system of things (OED, “Catastrophe”, 2). Not all disasters are catastrophes– for example, Walker Hall’s fire didn’t change the very system the college operates or, to say the very least, the perception of Walker Hall by the students. Therefore, it is not a catastrophe but a disaster. However, if the Covid-19 Pandemic is determined to be able to change the people’s fundamental way of life, then it can be defined as both a catastrophe and a disaster.
Tragedy is used more liberally. Anything that is lamentable or causes great suffering can be a tragedy. Expected and unexpected events can both be tragic. However, disaster emphasizes the “unexpected” nature of the event. Disaster also refers to a tragedy of a greater scale, such as casualties of multiple personnel, damage to public property, etc.
Calamity has minimal difference with disaster in every sense except that it should have been averted if proper precautions are undertaken. Therefore, calamity refers more specifically to the human suffering caused by negligence, mismanagement, and foul intent.
Voices
In my profession, a disaster is considered any emergency that exceeds the amount of resources needed to effectively manage it. Subjective/not very precise, but that’s the admittedly technical definition.
Matthew Hart, Director of Emergency Management, Amherst College
I would distinguish catastrophes, the subject of my course, from disasters. catastrophes, I would say, are disasters that shake the normative order.
Lawrence Douglas, Faculty, Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought