What is a 'hazard'?

We have all heard the word 'hazard'. On most, if not all, cigarette packets there is a message saying that 'smoking is a health hazard.' When we drive we often see signs saying 'traffic hazard ahead'; and we have probably heard someone saying that 'life is a hazard.'

In the context of emergency management, 'hazard' has a very specific meaning, and is defined as follows:

'A source of potential harm or a situation with a potential to cause loss.' (Emergency Management Australia (2000), Emergency Risk Management Applications Guide.)

This is the definition of hazard that we will be using in this subject.

Other definitions you may find used within the context of emergency management include:

The common theme of these definitions is the potential for harm. The EMA Emergency Risk Management Applications Guide definition is the most explicit and concise of these three.

 

Hazard
≠
Event


You might have noticed that a hazard is not an event -it is the potential for an event. Therefore 'bushfire' in a general sense, or even applied to a particular place, is a hazard. An actual bushfire is an 'incident', 'emergency' or even a 'disaster'. When we do a hazard analysis on a bushfire for a particular place, we are looking at the potential for bushfire events, and of the possible effects that they may have. Analysing an actual bushfire that has occurred is not doing a hazard analysis on bushfire. This is because each event is unique, and if we base our emergency management on a specific event we will be making too many unwarranted assumptions. What is true of one bushfire will not necessarily be true of all bushfires.

 



What hazards concern you?

 

To get you thinking about the sorts of hazards (natural or human-caused) that may concern you, look through the booklet, Hazards, disasters and your community. (EMA, 2003) Don't be too concerned with the detail-for example, the 'Survival and Property Protection' sections are not important at this stage. Keep in mind that there are major hazards with their resultant disasters in terms of their destructive powers-there are also many other hazards that may be of just as much concern to you, whilst on a 'less grand' scale.

 


Activity 1.1

learning portfolio activityRead

Textbook: Emergency Management Australia (2003). Hazards, disasters and your community: A booklet for students and the community, EMA: Canberra.

  1. Which of the hazards described in the booklet are present in your area? List them under ''natural' and 'human-caused' hazards.
  2. Which of these hazards do you think is the most serious for your area?
  3. Have any of the specific emergencies and disasters listed in the booklet affected your area? In what ways was the area and/or community affected? Would such hazards have a similar effect again?

    If the listed emergencies and disasters have not affected your area, can you imagine any of them occurring in your area, and if so, what sort of harm might occur?
  4. So, what do hazards mean to you? I would like you to write down five hazards that cause concern to you. These might be natural hazards, such as bushfires or floods, or technological hazards such as toxic gas release or vehicle accidents, or hazards that affect the environment, such as oil pollution or greenhouse effect, or hazards that affect society, such as HIV/AIDS, mass unemployment etc.
  5. Now that you've written these hazards down, I'd like you to rank them in order of priority. Rank the hazard on your list that worries you the most by putting a '1' next to it, and give the one that worries you the least a '5', and rank the others in between accordingly. Re-write your list of hazards so that the highest priority is at the top of your list and the lowest priority hazard at the bottom.

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Now wait a minute! What have you actually done? You have written down the hazards that worry you-but are these the same hazards that worry your relatives, or your neighbours, or your community as a whole? Probably not.

Secondly, are these hazards in fact really a problem, or do they just worry you?

Thirdly, if there are a number of hazards that may affect you, which is the most serious?

To answer these questions you need some hard facts, and you need to analyse them. This is the essence of hazard analysis-determining what hazards confront us, and in what ways they may affect us. A hazard analysis is just one of the many 'tools' that an emergency manager and a community can use to more effectively manage the risks that they face. Let's look at the concept of hazard analysis more fully.

 

 

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