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Article: Disasters
- Article from:
- Macmillan Encyclopedia of Death and Dying
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2003 The Gale Group Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Disasters
Disasters are stressful life situations that result in great terror, property damage, physical harm, and often death. Calamity and catastrophe, synonymous terms for these traumatic events, often involve extreme forces of nature like earthquakes, fires, floods, hurricanes, and tornadoes. Sometimes, though, people's behavior is the causal factor behind a disaster, or is contributory to higher losses of property and lives from events that were clearly avoidable. This happens through human error (a pilot's engineering mistake in an airplane crash), human carelessness and indifference (lax building practices), and intentional acts of cruelty and violence by some individuals against ...