If you scan a movie theater marquee, there’s a good chance you’ll find some sort of disaster story: a killer asteroid, a zombie apocalypse, the moon falling from the sky. Turn on the news and the picture is still pretty bleak, as we enter the third year of the COVID-19 pandemic and a changing climate hastens hurricanes and wildfires with alarming regularity. But though we’re inundated with these disaster stories, many of us remain unaware of — and unprepared for — some of the biggest potential threats.
Defining Disaster
We sometimes think about disasters in terms of either natural events (like hurricanes) or human-made ones (like an explosion at a nuclear plant). To disaster experts, however, the lines are blurred.
“There are no natural disasters,” says Shanna McClain, the disasters program manager for NASA’s Applied Earth Sciences Program. Natural hazards, such as flooding or earthquakes, she says, are simply part of Earth’s geological and meteorological processes — even if they're spurred on by human actions. They're considered neutral events that only become "disasters" when humans' lives and livelihoods are impacted.
