Definitions of emergency and disaster
Before we delve into this specific subject, its various topics and the process of selecting an emergency or disaster event to analyse, let us reflect back to the emergency management planning component of this course and specifically look back to EMG100, Introduction to Emergency Management. In this subject you looked at some definitions used to describe the terms disaster, emergency, catastrophe and calamity.
The Australian Emergency Management Glossary gives these definitions:
Emergency: |
An event, actual or imminent, which endangers or threatens to endanger life, property or the environment, and which requires a significant and coordinated response.
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Disaster: |
A serious disruption to community life which threatens or causes death or injury in that community and/or damage to property which is beyond the day-today capacity of the prescribed statutory authorities and which requires special mobilisation and organisation of resources other than those normally available to those authorities. |
In your various assignments this year, you will need to examine an event that has implications on the various components that make an event an emergency or a disaster, i.e. people injured or killed; community infrastructures disrupted; damage to property, of a scale not normally managed on a day to day basis and which requires a coordinated approach to responding to and recovering from the event’s impact.